ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Earth observation (EO) and geographical information systems (GIS) represent two important media through which these objectives can be pursued, and that they allow Geography to address significant problems of society and the environment using explicitly spatial data, information, evidence and knowledge. Most Geography students experience courses in ‘geographical concepts’ that turn out to be long on how to think about scientific method, but short on the ‘doing’ of Geography. The geographer’s art is fundamentally about understanding how and why significant events may be unevenly distributed across space and time; the geographer’s science is fundamentally concerned with generalizing effectively between and about them. A common trait of GIS and EO research is the similar quantitative and computational skills that they demand and engender. EO and GIS thus can create data-rich representations of the way the world looks at any geo-referenced location.
