First Training Course of the International Research Center on Karst (IRCK)
under the Auspices of UNESCO
GIS Spatial Analysis and its application in Geoscience
(2008-05-28)

 

   The seminar lasted 5 days from 19 to 23 May 2008 . More than 59 participants attended it but only 52 of them obtained the certificate. Dr. Jun Yan, who came from Department of Geography & Geology in Western Kentucky University , gave the lectures. The International Research Center on Karst (IRCK) under the Auspices of UNESCO (IRCK) and the Karst Dynamics Laboratory (KDL) jointly organized this seminar.
     The participants are composed mostly by young people, and some of them are still master in Universities and Chinese Academy of Science, while some people work in China Geological Survey for just few years. Their own fields are mostly karstology, and maybe this was the reason why they took part in the seminar. Professions of participants are hydrogeology, engineering geology, ecology, environment and biology. GIS is a popular application in these fields.
    Dr. Yan explained 360 slides and gave 26 exercises in the whole teaching, so the process of the seminar was very compact. Classic contents of GIS such as MAUP, edge effect, scale, ecological fallacy, spatial interaction, spatial point pattern analysis, spatial autocorrelation, spatial interpolation, and multivariate statistical methods and so on were discussed one by one.
     Prof. Yuan, who was the president of the seminar, welcome every member and the teacher in the open ceremony. He said this seminar is the first course in the history of IRCK, and he is happy to see many people outside from Guilin are interested in this education. He said more activities will be held in the future.
     At 14:28 , 19 May 2008 , this sorrowful moment, the whole seminar member stood in silence mourning for three minutes together with 1.3 billion Chinese people, as thousands of people died in the Sichuan Earthquake. In break time of 21 May participants visited the Karst Geology Museum , which was a perfect site for layman to understand karst.
     At the end of the seminar, a little close ceremony was held, in which participants accepted their certificates. This is only the beginning of the study, and the participants must pay out more sweat before real mastery of GIS.