Urban affairs & planning: Virginia Tech support for GIS and remote sensing

Center for Environmental Applications of Remote Sensing (CEARS)

The mission of the CEARS at Virginia Tech is to provide interdisciplinary leadership in remote sensing through formal instruction, outreach, cooperative research, and consulting. CEARS contributes to applications of the science and technology necessary to better understand effects of both natural and human-induced variability and change within the Earth system.

Center for Geospatial Information Technology (CGIT)

Virginia Tech's Center for Geospatial Information Technology (CGIT) is an interdisciplinary research center that collaborates across academic, government, and private sectors in the development of innovative geospatial solutions, and in elevating awareness for spatially enabling actionable intelligence and knowledge. CGIT contributes to Virginia Tech’s tripartite research, educational, and outreach mission by generating scientific knowledge, educating graduate and undergraduate students, and helping to solve societal problems through the application of geospatial sciences techniques across a broad spectrum of problem domains. The center provides next generation applied geospatial research in a broad range of areas including geovisualization, geoinformatics, 3-D geodata, spatial data infrastructures, modeling and simulation, and high performance computing to address research questions in broadband, agro-forestry, safety and security, health, smart cities,and community resilience to address complex problems from local to global scales.

Conservation Management Institute (CMI)

​The Conservation Management Institute is an active partner in the management of natural resources in Virginia, across North America, and around the world. Institute project teams comprised of research faculty, staff, and students engage resource management agencies and organizations to understand their objectives and constraints in order to produce quality solutions through hard work and the application of sound science. Our researchers employ a range of skills, knowledge, and talents with particular strengths in field ecology, geospatial information technology, resource assessment, and logistical support.

Enterprise GIS Group

​The Enterprise GIS Group was created in 2008 as a unit of "Converged Technologies for Security, Safety, and Resilience" which reports to the University CIO.  Enterprise GIS facilitates access to central IT resources supporting storage and hosting of GIS data for academic and administrative uses within the university community.  The group also provides training that lowers barriers to entry to the use of GIS tools, analysis processes, and other resources as the state-of-the-art in geospatial sciences continues to advance. Central support of GIS as a strategic component of the university’s technology infrastructure is intended to create efficiencies of scale and significant cost savings to university departments by leveraging the latest technologies in data hosting and storage as well as the expertise of the IT professionals in the IT organization who manage the university's computing and networking functions on a daily basis.

Virginia geospatial Extension Program (VGEP)

​Virginia's Geospatial Extension Program serves to directly support the role of Virginia’s communities and other stakeholders, by engaging professionals and organizations through technical training and assistance, through the development of educational resources, and through the identification and development of geospatial applications. The Geospatial Extension Program also coordinates with other organizations that have a vested interest in empowering local stakeholders and educators to better support the management of Virginia's resources.

• Architecture Annex Computer Lab - has 25 computers loaded with the ESRI and Autodesk products.
• Geography Computer Lab -  located in 102 Major Williams Hall  - The Geography department houses the GIS Laboratory as the primary resource for the entire Geography department.
• Torgersen Hall (Rooms 1010 & 1080) - teaching labs during the day, but usually open to any student in the evening assuming there are no classes being taught.

Office of Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing Research (OGIS)

OGIS is an affiliation of teaching and research faculty from 5 colleges, 15 departments and the Virginia Tech Libraries who share an interest and expertise in Geospatial Information Technologies (GIT).

Geospatial Archive Resource and Data Exchange Network (GARDEN)

The GARDEN project is a joint initiative between the Virginia Geographic Information Network (VGIN) and leading universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Through GARDEN, participating universities serve as a "mirror" for VGIN's datasets, providing a locally hosted, faster performing set of map layers to faculty, staff and students, while providing redundancy and geographic diversity of off-site storage locations to VGIN.
Virginia Tech's GARDEN node is hosted at http://garden.gis.vt.edu.