Have you ever been a backseat driver, fishing through a road atlas to find the right direction? Or maybe you’ve been turning around on the spot to try and get your Google Maps to show you which direction you’re facing. If this sounds like you, you’ve been using geospatial technologies.
Once upon a time, paper maps were the main source of geospatial and geographical information. They’d tell you where things were, how to get from place to place, and even helped militaries win wars. Then technology began to dominate every part of society. Now we have geospatial information and data: we use different types of technologies like remote sensing, GIS, and GPS, often without even knowing it. Geospatial technologies are used for many different things, from Snapchat all the way to military drone movements. But what exactly is the definition of geospatial technologies? What are they used for in geography? What is the future of geospatial technology? Let’s take a look.
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Geospatial Technologies Definition
Geographers would be pretty lost without geospatial information. It shows us the where and the what and is a vital way that geographers can collect and analyze data. Geospatial information, or geographical data, is information that shows locations or geographical features on the landscape, from vegetation or population data, all the way to country borders.
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Fig. 1 – Babylonian map, believed to be the first-ever map of the world.
Throughout history, dating back hundreds of years, mapping was the main source of geospatial information. In the city of Babylon, thousands of years ago, the oldest preserved map of the world was carved into a piece of clay. In 1570, the first-ever atlas was created, the Typus Orbis Terrarum, famously printed with the quote below.
Now, however, we are living in a technological and digitized era in which geospatial technologies are at the forefront of geographical and geospatial data.
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As time progressed into the 19th century, developments in geospatial data began. Aerial photography is a great example of how geospatial data began to modernize. Cameras were attached to things like balloons, to gather geospatial information. In the 20th century, satellites were introduced during the Cold War. Satellites collect geographical information from space and can help provide weather and climate information as well as data useful for military purposes.
Geospatial Technology Types
“Geospatial technology” is an umbrella term for a collection of technology types. Let’s explore some of the geospatial technology types that are commonly used today. Some of the major types of geospatial technologies are: remote sensing systems, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Global Positioning Systems (GPS).
Remote Sensing
Remote sensing is the process of monitoring the earth’s surface, through the reflection of radiation that is emitted, to collect geospatial data. Cameras and other/sensors on satellites or aircraft capture visual or sonar imagery of the earth’s surface or even the depths of the ocean to tell us things we’d never be able to find out if we were obtaining data at ground level.
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