The focus of this lab is the analysis of lake sediment in order to reconstruct past environmental conditions including vegetation and disturbances such as fire.  Equipment includes a Barrington MS2c magnetic susceptibility core logging sensor, pollen and charcoal reference collections, a variety of microscopes, sediment sieves, and sampling equipment for field work and laboratory core analysis, along with refrigerated core storage.

The Paleoecology lab is equipped with standard laboratory equipment, including microscopes, beakers, and scales. The lab also features a fume hood for chemical assays.

The Soils Lab is equipped with a variety of state-of-the-art instruments and equipment to collect and analyze soil samples and conduct landscape-scale analyses in field settings. In the laboratory, equipment is available to analyze basic soil properties using either discreet soil samples or soil cores and prepare samples for analysis at external labs. For more information, visit the Soils Research Laboratory homepage.

Geography technique courses such as Cartography, Computer Cartography, Introductory and Advanced GIS, and Remote Sensing of the Environment are taught in the laboratory.Urban Planning courses, such as Introduction to Urban Planning and Computer Uses in Urban Analysis, are also taught in the GIS Lab.

The department has the latest equipment for cartography, computer cartography, digital image processing and GIS. The GIS facilities are noted among the best of any university in the State of Wisconsin. The department shares site licenses with other University of Wisconsin campuses for state-of-the-art ESRI products. Twenty workstations are configured in a LAN environment with specialized printers and plotters for the highest quality output.

The laboratory is well-equipped with hardware and software in a local area network (LAN) environment. Twenty-four HP/Compaq computers are used for data servers and workstations. Peripheral devices include digitizers, scanners, laser printers, large and small format color printers and plotters. Primary software packages include ESRI ArcGIS, ARC/INFO, SDE, MapObjects, and ArcIMS; MapInfo/Vertical Mapper; MapViewer, Surfer and Grapher and Microsoft Visual Basic and Office 2007.

The laboratory also supports faculty-student collaborative research projects evolving from grants, contracts, and various other sources. The Geography department also provides GIS training courses for local GIS users.

We maintain two teaching laboratories, which can accommodate up to 32 students each.