Equipped with drones, thermal cameras, and more, members of UT’s GIS in the Community course traveled to Costa Rica for a real-world lesson in how geographic information science and technology can make lives better.
GIS Course Serves Communities
Through the course GIS in the Community, Geography 420, UT students have worked with state and local governments, nonprofit organizations, and campus partners.
“The goal of the course is involving students in projects that address community-identified needs, while developing academic skills and commitment to their community,” said Teaching Assistant Professor Maya Roman-Rivera.
Over recent years, students in the course have worked with organizations such as:
- Beck Cultural Exchange Center, mapping African American places and institutions destroyed by Knoxville urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s
- City of Oak Ridge, updating firefighters’ maps
- Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM), creating a dashboard to showcase evictions in Knox County after the Covid-19 pandemic
- Emerald Academy, optimizing school bus routes
- Tennessee Geographic Alliance, building interactive and static atlases of Tennessee.
- Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, identifying abandoned mines
- UT Center for Sports, Peace, and Society, creating interactive global maps with information on laws and policies
- UT System, building GIS tools for opioid research
In spring 2026, students are working with Rooted East and United Way of Greater Knoxville to examine food scarcity and food desert issues in Knoxville. They also are working with UT Facilities to create a 3D map of campus for visually impaired people.
Students from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have long worked with partners on campus, in local communities, and throughout the state on service-learning projects as they practice applying geographic information science (GIS). Now they have partnered with a village in Central America.
In the first study-abroad project through the course GIS in the Community, 11 students visited Uvita, Costa Rica, in spring 2025. Members of UT’s Department of Geography and Sustainability partnered with the education organization GISetc, which has deep connections with the leaders in Uvita, an area experiencing both population growth and overtourism.
“This community is small but growing rapidly, so it is facing many environmental issues including problems with their air and water quality,” said Teaching Assistant Professor Maya Roman-Rivera.
Michael Camponovo, UT’s GIS outreach coordinator, and GIS Lab Manager Tim Kane accompanied the students on the research trip and ensured they had the drones, sensors, cameras, and other equipment they needed to gather data.
The Power of Maps
Working in teams, the students investigated environmental and urban planning issues, and presented their initial findings to local government officials, nonprofit organizations, and business owners before returning to Knoxville.
“It’s easy to become jaded to how powerful maps can be when you think about them all day, but one of the most important moments of the students’ presentation to the community stakeholders was showing aerial imagery of their town over time so they could see the extent of the landscape change with their own eyes from a new perspective,” Camponovo said. “Attendees were literally on the edge of their seats.”
“The students identified hotspots of development that are affecting natural resources in the region,” Roman-Rivera said. “They also provided ideas of how to grow the town while being more sustainable, including crowd-control measures to protect resources and prevent overcrowding.”
Along the coast the students identified erosion and tree line loss that could become a problem for the community, and they provided the first bathymetric data of the region for coral reef researchers, including water temperature and turbidity analysis.
“What was especially important was collecting the sonar data and building 3D models of the coral reefs so the researchers could better understand how depth, slope, and other features may be impacting which corals are better suited to survive,” Camponovo said. “Plus it gave them better information to determine where to place propagated corals.”
Classroom to Community Impact
Ellie Bernstein worked on transportation analysis as part of the Land Use Land Cover team. She and the other team members completed field work, community engagement, qualitative literature and news analysis, population data analysis, and GIS visualizations.
“This was the first time I have been able to fully decide on and execute a project that had the capacity for a positive impact on a real audience,” said Bernstein, who is graduating this spring with a bachelor’s degree in geography and concentrations in both GIS and space, society, and culture.
As an undergraduate, Bernstein has had internships with the City of Knoxville’s Housing and Neighborhood Development Department and the East Tennessee Development District, plus worked on research with human geography Associate Professor Solange Muñoz.
Through UT’s geography program Bernstein gained a well-rounded understanding of all types of geography—including its intersection with sociology and urban studies—as well as professional experience with supportive mentors.
“This program is an ideal undergraduate degree for urban planning and community development,” she said.
Roman-Rivera was unable to travel with the students, but is working with the leaders of GISetc to summarize all the data and share it with the Uvita community. The students’ final report will be published in the GIS industry newsletter ArcNews.
“The goal is that we can then go back every two years and follow up with one of these projects,” she said. “We are hoping the community itself can identify what project is more important for them to continue.”
GISetc provided unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and sensors to measure air quality, water quality, and noise pollution on site. UT took sonar equipment for coral reef mapping along with thermal, waterproof, and 360-degree cameras, while Bad Elf loaned GPS units for the trip. The project also received support through the UT Office of Sustainability, UT geography and sustainability Professor Emeritus Bruce Ralston, the geospatial company Woolpert, and the Tennessee Geographic Information Council.
by Amy Beth Miller