Department of Geography resources
Computer lab facilities
The Department maintains three high performance computing labs. These labs are located on the 3rd (ES307) and 4th (ES407 & ES415) floors of the Earth Science building and are primarily used in lab and lecture instruction for GIS, Remote Sensing, Cartography, Hydrology, Landscape Ecology, and Spatial Statistics. The ES415 computer lab is primarily for MGIS (Masters of GIS program) graduate students.
Please note that labs must be booked by faculty members.
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ES307
The computer lab located in ES 307 has 24 available seats for student learning. The courses that primarily use this lab are undergraduate GIS, remote sensing and cartography.
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ES407
The computer lab located in ES 407 has 26 available seats for student learning. The courses that primarily use this lab are undergraduate and graduate level GIS, remote sensing, hydrology, and Spatial Ecology.
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ES415
The MGIS computer lab has 24 dedicated machines for use by MGIS and graduate students only. Courses that are generally taught in this lab include Spatial Statistics, Advanced GIS and RS, and Programming.
The Department is host to state-of-the-art software packages in GIS, Remote Sensing, Cartography, and Statistics. Refer to the full suite of software applications that we currently deploy in our computer labs below.
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GIS
ArcGIS Desktop (ArcGIS Pro and ArcMap)
QGIS
GRASS GIS
SAGA GIS
UDig
postgreSQL + PostGIS -
Remote sensing
PCI Geomatica
ENVI / IDL -
Geo-utilities and other
Agisoft Photoscan
Microsoft Office
GPS Utility
Google Earth Pro -
Graphics
Avenza MAPublisher
Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat) -
Programming
Jupyter Notebook
MATLAB
PyScriptor
Visual Studio
Python
Java
NotePad++ -
Statistics
SigmaPlot
MATLAB
SPSS
R Studio, R
GWR
Geoda
FragStats
Chelsea Fitzpatrick
RS/GIS Analyst, computer labs
Cartography, Graphic Design, Posters
Geography Department general hardware and software
Geography Collections Room
ES 457
The Collections Room is a resource centre and a location for reading, studying, or doing group work.
View our large collection of atlases, air photos, topographic maps of Alberta and Canada (NTS), and other maps from around the world, as well as geographical reference and course materials. More than 20,000 maps are stored in large map cabinets and in wall map format, complementing those in the Maps and Air Photo Library section of the main library on campus. Teaching sets and visual aids are made available to course and laboratory instructors. Many journal titles, books, course and laboratory material, Geography graduate theses, proposals and projects are also available for viewing.
University Weather Research Station
One of the most important services provided by the Geography Department is the servicing and maintenance of the University Weather Research Station which is located at the University of Calgary Spy Hill campus. Since the early 1960’s, the station has been collecting climate data within the City of Calgary. This data includes twice-daily manual observations of cloud cover, present and past weather conditions, visibility, precipitation, evaporation, ground condition and snow depth. Also recorded are one minute values of seven depths of soil temperature, three levels of air temperature, relative humidity, wind data, incoming and outgoing short, long and PAR bandwidth radiation, ground heat flux, soil moisture, pressure and precipitation.
In addition, the University Weather Research Station has a wide selection of other equipment used for special research projects and field work including radiosonde equipment, nuclear soil moisture probe, snow and soil sampling equipment and hydrology equipment. The station provides a hands on teaching facility for students in and out of the University community, and also provides processed data to everyone from the Atmospheric Environment Service to the general public. This data may vary from the present atmospheric pressure to climatological and meteorological maps and charts used in forecasting and scientific studies.