Challenges for GIScience: Assessment of Policy Relevant Human-Environment Interactions

In 2001, National Academy Press published Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences in response to National Science Foundation’s request of the National Research Council to identify the most important environmental research agenda items for the next decade that would have the greatest practical bearing on science and policy. Not long afterward, the 2001 Open Meeting of the Humans Dimensions of Global Change community was convened in Rio de Janeiro to ascertain their own priorities for the global agenda. Not coincidentally, a number of emergent themes voiced in these two organizations have also increasingly been discussed by researchers studying human-environment interactions as pressing agenda items for further understanding the interactions between people and the landscape as influencing and being influenced by policy. The NAP 2001 report, for instance, cited land-use dynamics as not only one of the eight (out of 200) most pressing issues facing environmental scientists and policymakers, but moreover recommended land-use dynamics as one of the four areas most likely to achieve significant and practical gains over the next decade given adequate scholarly attention and support. Most important for this work was the continued development of a suite of techniques that have come to be referred to as GIScience. Geographic Information Science (GISc) refers to the integration of two components: scientific theory and information systems.