About GIS at WM

The Center for Geospatial Analysis (CGA) is an inter-disciplinary GIS program on the campus of William and Mary. We offer GIS classes in Geology, Environmental Science, Anthropology, Health Science, Biology and GIScience classes such as GIS Programming. The CGA employs one full-time faculty member with expertise in GIS. It supports competitive grants totaling $1.5 million and employs between 3-10 grant staff and 2-5 students at any given time. The CGA partners with other GIS faculty across campus including Dr. Leu (geostatistics, ecology, biology), Dr. Hamilton (geography, LCLUC, lidar, deforestation), Dr. Hancock (geology, river processes, erosion), and Dr. Watkinson (art history) and numerous other faculty and staff that incorporate GIS into their research. At the college level, we have access to a database engineer and a GIS programmer. We have a state-of-the-art 15-seat GIS lab and an open source alternate in our 2000ft² purpose built teaching and researching facility housed within Swem Library. We have access to Stereo GIS, Open Source GIS, and house VA Lidar and USA School attendance boundaries in our GIS data center. We have a server structure comprising of four front-end GIS web servers, 2 database servers (Oracle and Microsoft SQL) totaling 20TB of available GIS storage, and GIS equipment such as large map plotters and large format scanners. The CGA is a partner with VGIN to distribute their GIS holdings. The CGA is supported with grants from Mellon, NSF, and internal awards.