I recently interviewed Eric Sanderson, landscape ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and originator of the Mannahatta concept and book where the layers of Manhattan are peeled back 400 years to reveal the originating ecology and biodiversity of this heavily populated metropolis. The feedback and exposure from this project give Sanderson a rock-star status in the geocommunity, but the attention hasn’t slowed his drive to reveal ecological connections, or his advocacy for geospatial technology.
The following is an excerpt from the interview about the evolution and promise of GIS:
“When I learned how to do GIS, my professors had learned on big mainframes at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and you had to have a Ph.D. and be very well connected into huge government programs to learn that technology. When I was in graduate school it was all on workstations and Silicon Graphics machines, and satellite images on big reels. A 140 megabyte image was a big deal.
By the time I came to WCS in the late 90s, and started to build the program here in New York, it was all desktops and laptops, with people actually doing GIS on laptops with solar panels in Africa. And now, you can do rather high end processing tasks online. I think it’s going into the cloud, where we’ll interface with cloud-based solutions. You’ll send out your job to get processed someplace and it will come back to you.
I think we’re just at the beginning in terms of this revolution. In the way that people invented watches and clocks, it took several hundred years for individual time-keeping to spread, but it eventually completely revolutionized the way society organized itself. This sort of geoliteracy, including how your location today relates to the past and the future, is a really exciting place to be.”
Read the full interview here.
