SPREADING THE FRONTIERS OF MAPS.

• Author: Pratt, Timothy
• Position: Geographic information systems

With instantly accessible geographic data, computer technology has taken cartography into a new realm, providing an essential tool for decision makers in the public and private sectors

The German geographer Martin Waldseemuller printed the first map to use the name America, with twelve wood blocks, and it covered about thirty-six square feet. The map was so popular that a second edition had to be printed four months later. This was April 1507.

The huge map was one step forward in a string of trials and errors drawn out over decades, as courts and church in Portugal and Spain wavered between believing in the Indies of Columbus and the New World of Amerigo Vespucci. The debate prospered because the European nations involved put lots of money and people behind navigating, mapping, and analyzing maps.

Five hundred years later, the countries between Alaska and Patagonia may be poised for a different kind of mapping renaissance, this time one they themselves create. Now the tool is a computer-age software spin-off called geographic information systems, or GIS, which promises to catapult mapping technology onto the screens of politicians, company presidents, students, scholars, and everyday people throughout the region. After a first-ever February meeting in Bogota, Colombia, some twenty nations in the Americas are pushing this technology forward. They've formed a regional committee to create national plans for acquiring, managing, and sharing geographic-information systems data.

GIS itself is really barely an adult, as software designers and academics only began tinkering together in the 1960s. By the eighties, rudimentary commercial software appeared on the market. Now it is a multibillion-dollar industry, as users from Federal Express to Venezuela's disaster-relief committee set up after last December's floods all see the benefit of overlaying different kinds of geographically referenced information onto a map, and processing this information at electronic speed.

It is the processing that mainly separates this tool from the best-selling maps printed by our German clergyman at the dawn of the sixteenth century. Processing geographical information in the region will be particularly useful in the areas of disaster relief, natural resource management, and private-sector development.

Let's take the example of a minister of the environment in a South American country. He or she wants to develop a conservation strategy for wild cousins of the potato plant--one of the many international crops originally from this region. Using GIS software, the minister first locates on a map where these plants have been found in the past, borrowing from an agricultural research center's data base. Then, a layer of information is added indicating population centers--data courtesy of the census bureau; another one showing wilderness areas--from the Ministry of the Environment; a third indicating major roads--from the Ministry of Transport; and still another showing a planned hydroelectric plant--from the Planning Department. Finally, another piece of GIS software can factor in climate data to predict where similar plants might be found in the wild. All this data is then crunched, as computer folks call what they do. The resulting final image will help the minister decide where to go out in the field and look for...