Mission Geography Skills

1. Mission Geography Skills Spatial Thinking and Remote Sensing

2. Mission Geography Skills • Key geographic skills… • Five skills • Remote sensing

3. Spatial Relations • Skills needed to recognize spatial distribution and spatial patterns • Identify shapes • Recalling and representing layouts • Connecting locations • Associating and correlating spatially distributed phenomena

4. Spatial Relations (cont.) • Comprehending and using spatial hierarchies • Regionalizing • Comprehending distance decay and nearest neighbor effects • Imagining maps from verbal descriptions • Sketch mapping • Comparing maps • Overlaying and dissolving maps

5. Why skills are important • Provide necessary tools and techniques for thinking spatially • Necessary for making wise personal, community, governmental, and business decisions Community, government, and business decisions Life skills

6. Five Core Skills • Asking geographic questions • Where? • Acquiring geographic information • Gathering data • Organizing geographic information • Maps, reports, and more • Analyzing geographic information • What does it mean? • Answering geographic questions • What have I learned?

7. Asking Geographic Questions • Why things are where they are and how they got there… • Where is it located? • Why is it there? • What else is there, too? • What are the consequences of the location and associations of things there? • What is being observed? • What are my perceptions of it?

8. Asking Geographic Questions Skills…  Students identify geographic issues and define problems  Students ask geographic questions  Students can plan and organize a geographic research project • Specify a problem • Pose a research question or hypothesis • Identify areas in need of investigation • Test the hypothesis/answer the question

9. Acquiring Geographic Information • What is geographic information? • Information about locations, • Human and physical characteristics of locations, • About the geographic activities and conditions of humans who live there • Kinds of geographic data? • Primary • Field work, community-based learning • Secondary • Texts, maps, statistics, photos, multimedia, computer-based databases, telephone directories

10. Acquiring Geographic Information Skills… •  Locating and collecting data • Maps, images, and a variety of other sources  Observation and systematic recording of information  Interpretation of maps and other graphics

11. Organizing Geographic Information • Many ways to organize and present geographic information • Maps • Graphs, tables, spreadsheets, and timelines • Oral and written reports • Multimedia: pictures, maps, graphs, captions, web pages • Poems, collages, plays, journal writing, and essays

12. Analyzing Geographic Information • Seeking patterns, relationships, and connections within geographic information Maps/Images spatial patterns Graphs trends/relationships Data sequences, correlations, trends Texts explanations/syntheses

13. Answering Geographic Questions • Developing and making generalizations • Key ideas that students should learn at the culmination of a process of inquiry • Requires that students • Use the information they have collected, processed & analyzedOR • Take the evidence they have acquired to make decisions, solve problems, or make judgments on a question, problem, or issue

14. Answering Geographic Questions • Last step in the process of inquiry… Organizing geographic information Acquiring geographic information Analyzing geographic information Asking geographic questions Answering geographic questions

15. Examples of MG Skills • Graphing • Measuring • Regionalizing • Map comparisons • Nearest neighbor effects • Connecting locations

16. Remote Sensing ‘science and art of identifying, observing, and measuring an object without coming into direct contact with it’ --a tool and technique

17. Remote Sensing Process: • Detection and measurement of ELECTROMAGENTIC RADIATION at different wavelengths reflected or emitted from distant objects/materials • Data provides ability to identify Earth features & materials

18. Remote Sensing • Purpose: • Identify and categorize by class/type, substance, and spatial distribution e.g., features in a scene (presented as image) classified into categories or classes Image-->thematic map e.g., land use, vegetation types, rainfall • Can also abstract information about an object

19. Color… • Objects appear different at different wavelengths and produce different information, • Computers can be used to produce a color image from a black and white remote sensing data set.

20. Remote Sensing • Methods PLATFORM e.g., pigeon, balloon, airplane, satellite Remote sensing instrument e.g., radiometer, radar, spectrometer [AVHRR, MODIS, ETM+] Object, area, phenomenon viewed by sensor system

21. Remote Sensing Platform + instrument: Satellite + sensor Data from Earth orbiting satellites transmitted using radio waves to ground stations-->digital image. Digital image-->tiny shapes “PIXELS” (represent the energy reflected or emitted by each pixel)

22. Remote Sensing • PIXEL = area on ground (& image) that is a measure of the sensor’s ability to resolve (see) objects of different sizes 15 meters 15 meters Higher resolution (smaller pixel area)-->able to see smaller objects # of pixels in an image-->calculate area of a scene

23. Satellites • Human-made spacecraft placed in space to orbit another body • Crewed e.g., space shuttle, ISS • Uncrewed e.g., TERRA

24. Satellite Orbits… • Each satellite has a set path above Earth= orbit • varies with satellite’s purpose • polar orbit (circular above poles to survey all or portion of Earth as it turns below) • geosynchronous orbit (above equator at 35,888 km to match and “floating over” a point on equator • Low Earth orbit e.g., Space shuttle • Elliptical orbit

25. Why bother? Provide way-cool information…