Impacts of remote sensing on U.S. geography

This paper examines some impacts of remote sensing on geography. As geographers involved in this new technology, we review and place in context its development; and with a vision of its value to our discipline, we are concerned at its modest impact on major research areas in geography. Even acknowledging that, in a broader view, remote sensing's impact on geography has been greater than in other disciplines does not alleviate our concerns that few senior academic geographers have remote sensing research underway; that few economic geographers have examined its potential; that even fewer regional geographers with interests in less-developed countries have remote sensing research interests; and that although there has been growth in the number of remote sensing courses taught in geography, this has not been accompanied by publication in reviewed geographic journals. We ask the questions: What does remote sensing permit the geographer to do better and/or cheaper than he or she could do in the past? What may remote sensing enable future geographers to do which would be significant to professional and academic geography? We then find that the exploitation of the improved or unique information available to the geographer via the application of remote sensing techniques has barely begun. Yet, remote sensing is a reality within geography whose time has come. It is too powerful a tool to be ignored in terms of both its information potential and the logic implicit in the reasoning process employed to analyze the data. We predict it could change our perceptions, our methods of data analysis, our models, and our paradigms.