 I'm Ryan Baxter, a professor for the Penn State course in environmental applications of GIS. If you're interested in the natural world and how people interact with it and how we might use GIS to study it, then I really recommend you take this class. I imagine that the word environmental means different things to different people, so we'll have discussions about what exactly environmental GIS is and work through exercises that approach the environment from a variety of angles. For example, sewage treatment plants produce a great deal of solid waste and it has to go somewhere. So we'll use GIS to create a map of groundwater vulnerability so the waste can be disposed in areas where it won't impact sources of drinking water. Or maybe we know that a certain species of bird prefers habitat only along the edges of forests. We can use GIS to measure the amount of forest edge that's created or lost during deforestation to identify critical areas. So there are a lot of ways GIS can be used to help us interact with the world in an informed way. So in these and other topics we'll discuss the kinds of data we need, where to get it, and the GIS tools that are best suited to help us answer these questions. This course is a lot of fun and will challenge you to deploy GIS in ways that perhaps you hadn't before. After taking it, you'll be well equipped to develop databases and GIS workflows in your own application areas and also help you think about how best to communicate your results to what is very likely a diverse and complex group of stakeholders. I really look forward to seeing you in class.