Technology has the power to fundamentally change the relationship between man and the environment, and GIS technology in particular represents one of the most cost-effective tools we have at our disposal to help us address the complex global problems we are facing today. GISandScience.com highlights applications of geospatial technology for scientific research and understanding. Follow GIS and Science on Twitter

Contributors

Dawn Wright: Dawn Wright (aka “Deepsea Dawn”) is Esri‘s Chief Scientist and a professor of Geography and Oceanography at Oregon State University (OSU), where she has been on the faculty since 1995. Prior to joining the OSU faculty, she was a seagoing marine technician for the international Ocean Drilling Program and a post-doctoral research associate at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Newport, Oregon. A few years after the deepsea vehicle Argo I was used to discover the HMS Titanic in 1986, Dawn was presented with some of the first GIS data sets to be collected with that vehicle while a graduate student at UCSB. It was then that she first became acutely aware of the challenges of applying GIS to deep marine environments. She has since completed oceanographic fieldwork (oftentimes with GIS) in some of the most geologically-active regions on the planet, including the East Pacific Rise, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Juan de Fuca Ridge, the Tonga Trench, volcanoes under the Japan Sea and the Indian Ocean, and, most recently, American Samoa.  Follow Dawn Wright on Twitter