FNRM1902

This Freshman Seminar course explores the many ways imagery from satellites, airplanes, and more recently drones, allows us to better manage our environment and natural resources. This remotely sensed imagery, combined with other geospatial technologies, gives us an unparalleled ability to monitor our changing world, including identifying natural and anthropogenic environmental impacts such as deforestation and urbanization. Imagery also allows us to plan our land use to minimize or avoid those impacts. In this course, we will discuss how imagery and geospatial data are being used to solve environmental problems, experience imaging data applied to actual environmental issues, learn about the imaging sensors used to acquire these data, and study related applications of remote sensing. We will explore imagery from satellites such as NASA's Landsat, high-resolution commercial sensors (as seen in Google Earth), aircraft-based imaging and lidar sensors, drones, and non-Earth remote sensing. We will discuss the future of the remote sensing of the environment in light of new and emerging imaging technologies.

Since this is a Freshman Seminar that is focused on new college students, each class period will begin with a “College Pro Tip” that will cover an important skill, piece of information, or resource that will help you succeed at the University of Minnesota. These will generally take 10-15 minutes, after which we will cover the geospatial topic of the day. See the Class Schedule at the end of this syllabus for more information.
prereq: freshman

000979