[Mapserver-west] Introductions

[dllp]

I'm a mathematics instructor at a rural community college
in southern Arizona. We have a couple of mapservers that
are being used for animal species distributions, water studies,
etc., in Arizona. We are interested in expanding coverage to
include more data, more capabilities, more areas including
Mexico and South America.

 http://geo.cochise.edu/

|We are the central repository/clearinghouse for spatial data
|in the state of New Mexico (most data can be downloaded for free from
|our website)

Am interested in this and will look for this data. We have a small
species inventory project for animals (plants soon) in Cochise County
that is  linked to the  mapservers for distribution maps. We also
have links to the BISON (New Mexico) database which has some
anecdotal geospatial information.

 http://math.cochise.edu/animals

Everything is always 'under construction' and conforms to the
'ugly but useful' standard.  Students like the projects and help
maintain some of the resources. (They are making me come in
for one day during spring break to work on it ....)

The goal is to be able to sustain our computing resources and projects.
To do this we need some introductory courses in GIS, and other courses in
scientific computing/informatics that would transfer. Having enough
students to take courses is the only way the college can sustain activities
like this, and having courses that transfer as part of degree or
certificate programs is the only way students will take the courses.
So we have a kind of 'chicken and egg' problem: we need the courses
to sustain the resources, but we need the resources to have the courses.
If any institution, business or agency can help or needs to partner with a
rural, minority institution for a GIS or education grant - please 
contact us!

Being a rural college we don't have any money to support any kind of
computing in math/science so open source software is critical for us
if we want to do anything. We also need contact with other institutions
and professionals for projects like this, so I hope the mapserver-west
list will help with that (the main mapserver list is a lot to wade through!)
Thanks for setting everything up.

L. Prevett
Mathematics Instructor
Cochise College, Sierra Vista, AZ, US
prevettl at cochise.edu