Departmental Facilities

The Department of Geography works closely with Social Sciences Computing to provide students, faculty and staff state-of-the-art computing resources and support.

GIS / Research Lab

Regional Environmental Assessment Laboratory and Geographic Information System (REAL/GIS), a component of Institute of the Environment, is an advanced computer unit and a teaching lab housed in Geography. State-of-the-art Intel hardware, funded by a $700,000 donation from Intel, provides a full range of geographical information science tools to students.

The Benjamin and Gladys Thomas Air Photo Archives

The Spence Collection and the Fairchild Aerial Surveys, two of the finest and most extensive oblique aerial photograph collections of California, are housed in the Air Photo Archives in the Department of Geography. The archive is an invaluable historical record and extremely useful for visually documenting changes in the social and natural environment of Los Angeles as well as in neighboring counties. Because the photographs are oblique (taken at an angle instead of straight down) they provide a very descriptive view allowing easier determination of how property was used over the years. For more information, contact Airphoto Archives at airphoto@geog.ucla.edu.

Paleo-ecology Laboratory

Facilities are relatively extensive and consist of four rooms with full facilities for pollen and plant macrofossil processing and analysis, tree-ring analysis and elementary sedimentological analysis. Field equipment includes livingstone and hiller sediment corers, tree-ring corers and chainsaws, GPS, radios, and misc. field camp supplies. For more information, contact Principal Investigator Glen MacDonald.

Grad Lab

The Geography Department runs a lab exclusively for the graduate students of the Geography Department. The lab is equipped with fast computers and has the full ArcGIS suite installead as well as ENVI. Other GIS applications are constantly being evaluated and put on the grad lab computers.