Geographic Information System

A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a computer system built to capture, store, check, manipulate, analyse, manage and display data tied to specific positions on Earth's surface, letting spatial or geographic information be worked with systematically rather than as disconnected records. It typically draws its position data from GPS, a satellite navigation system made up of roughly 30 well-spaced orbiting satellites that let anyone with a ground receiver pinpoint their exact geographic location — used globally in fields such as mining, aviation, surveying, agriculture and marine ecosystem work. GIS itself supports a wide range of environmental applications: environmental impact assessment, disaster management, landslide-hazard zoning, determining land cover and land use, estimating flood damage, managing natural resources, soil and wetland mapping, irrigation management, identifying volcanic hazard, and vegetation studies including mapping of threatened and endemic species. A closely related technique, Remote Sensing, detects and monitors an area's physical characteristics by measuring the radiation it reflects or emits, observed from a distance rather than on the ground; this makes it a valuable conservation tool for producing precise data ranging from a single tree up to large tracts of vegetation and wildlife, supporting land-use classification, identifying biodiversity-rich or biodiversity-poor areas for future conservation planning, predicting favourable disease-spread climates, mapping forest fires and species distribution, tracking urban development and farmland/forest change over time, and mapping ocean-floor resources. India has deployed multiple satellites supporting exactly these applications — for exa …