The Department of Geosciences is a major user of the Education
Computing Classroom, a 30-unit teaching facility.
Each user station consists of a 75 Mhz Pentium personal computer equipped
with VGA monitor and small digitizing tablet. All machines are in a local network, where copies of Arc/Info, ArcView, Idrisi32, AutoCad, Netscape, and other software reside. Each computer is linked to
laser and color dot matrix printers. The laboratory sections of all
intermediate and advanced level GIS, cartography, and remote sensing
courses offered by the Geosciences Department are taught here.
The College of Forestry maintains several instructional labs equipped
with Pentium personal computers, Unix workstations, VGA monitors,
digitizing tablets and color printers. Software packages include ArcView,
GRASS, and ERDAS.
The Department of Geosciences and the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences received funding from NASA to establish this instructional laboratory. The lab is equipped with 15 Unix-based Sun Ultra 10 Unix workstations and 3 Dell NT workstations, running several software
packages (e.g., Arc/Info, ArcView, Erdas, ENVI, etc.) for teaching in GIS, scientific visualization,
remote sensing, and image processing.
Departments involved in Geographic Information Science research have
obtained the basic hardware and software needed for faculty
and graduate student projects. Most research units include
386 or 486 personal computers, Sun or IBM RS6000 workstations,
and Vax computers equpped with digitizing tablets, printers, and
plotters. Software such Arc/Info, GRASS, ERDAS, and AutoCad are
routinely used in GIS, cartographic, and remote sensing projects.
Digital data such as Landsat and Spot, AVHRR, Coastal Zone Color
Scanner sensor imagery, radar altimeter and scatterometer data, World
Data Bank II map features, USGS digital line graph (DLG), digital
elevation model (DEM), and U.S. Census Bureau TIGER files are
commonly accessed. Surveying research equipment includes total
station surveying instruments and global positioning system (GPS)
receivers.
The Terra Cognita Laboratory within the Geosciences Department has
several Unix-based machines (Sun, IBM RISC, and Silicon
Graphics workstations) and software packages (e.g., Arc/Info, ERMapper,
Iris Explorer, IBM Visualization Data Explorer) for use in image
processing, remote sensing, and GIS research. A 36-inch HP 650C DesignJet
plotter, a Phaser 340 color printer, and several laser printers are also
available.
Davey Jones' Locker within the Geosciences Department has 2 Unix, 3 Macintosh, and 1 Windows NT machine in support of marine & coastal GIS and
seafloor mapping.
The Department of Geosciences and the College of Oceanic and
Atmospheric Sciences received funding from NASA to establish this
laboratory for student research in GIS, scientific visualization, and remote
sensing. The lab is equipped with 5 Unix-based Unix workstations and 2 NT workstations, running several software packages, DVD player, CD etcher, raster image
processor, slide maker, slide scanner, and several printers and plotters.
Oregon Earth Watch is satellite data acquisition and processing facility,
designed to enhance research opportunities and education in these fields.
The facility collects data from two Seaspace satellite receiving stations,
one for geostationary satellites and one for polar orbiting satellites.
The data stream is archived and available for analysis on several
workstations running a variety of GIS and image processing software.
The Laboratory for Applications of Remote Sensing in Ecology specializes
in a variety of remote sensing research projects focused on
terrestrial ecology problems. This activity began in 1989 with a
concentration on using digital imagery to characterize forest structure in
the Pacific Northwest Douglas-fir/western hemlock vegetation zone.
Within the period of a few short years, Landsat-based maps of forest
structure were being directly incorporated into ecological analyses and
models operating at landscape to regional scales. Current modeling studies
include carbon flux, biodiversity, and spatially-explicit scaling of
ecological measurements and knowledge. Along with this broadening of
activities, has been the use of an ever-expansive use of data types.
Civil Engineering Surveying and Photogrammetry Laboratory
The Civil Engineering field surveying laboratory has one GPS
receiver, one top-mounted EDM, 10 theodolites, 12 automatic levels,
and 18 transits. The photogrammetry laboratory contains one WILD STK-l
precise comparator, 6 Kelsh-type stereoscopic plotters, and computer
access to the College of Engineering computer network.
ERSAL, which is located in the Department of Forest Resources, is
a lab dedicated to the applications of remote sensing and GIS
technology for the study of forest lands and related natural resource
problems.
College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences
The College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences has a wide array
of Unix- and VMS-based computer hardware and software for use in
image processing and remote sensing research. Broadcast-quality
video recording equipment is available for data visualization
such as video animations constructed from satellite observations
of sea surface temperature, sea level, surface wind stress,
near-surface chlorophyll concentration and other characteristics
of the ocean surface.
Center for Airborne Environmental Analysis/
Remote Sensing and System Analysis Laboratory
The center, hosted by Bioresource Engineering and Forest Science,
has 3 light research aircraft, 2 hyperspectral spectroradiometers,
2 thermal infrared sensors, 2 GPS receivers, one ground-penetration
radar, 4 image processing/GIS Unix workstations, and a near real-time
high-speed satellite link between the Canadian Center for Remote
Sensing, SPOT Image Corporation, EOSAT, and a data center in
Hermiston, Oregon. The center is dedicated to multiscale environmental/
ecological related studies.
Center for Environmental Computing
The Oregon State Center for Environmental Computing houses a host
of high-performance computing equipment in a new building adjacent to
the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. The centerpiece
of the computer hardware is a Connection Machines CM-5 parallel-processing
computer. The Center also has a CM-200 machine and a ring of 7 IBM
RS60000/560 workstations. Collectively, these computers are accessed
campus-wide via a wide-bandwidth university local area network for
use in numerical modeling of environmental variability and assimilation,
as well as analysis of satellite data.
