[MUSIC] Welcome to Fundamentals of GIS. My name is Nick Santos and I'm the Instructor for this course. I'm also a GIS developer at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, where I develop databases and software to help solve California's water problems. In this course, we're not going to make you GIS expert right off the bat, but we are going to teach you everything you need to know to open data, view data, make maps. And generally, be able to use GIS at a functional level. To do that, we're going to go over major GIS Software packages with a focus on ArcGIS, which is a very common GIS package used in the industry. We're also going to get you the concepts and terminology you need in order to be able to communicate with people who are speaking GIS terms like me, right now and also in order to be able to use GIS. Then we're going to go over viewing, loading and sharing data in ArcGIS, that includes everything from opening up your data and exploring it to making a map. Finally, the course is going to finish with common GIS datasets you need in order to analyze your own data. That's elevation data for the world, that's water data. It's also information that you can correlate with data you're taking in your own job. If you want to go even further, you should come and take the specialization with us. That's four courses and a capstone project that go much more in depth into GIS. It's going to be a lot of fun. It covers Analysis Workflows that are really common in GIS. It covers creating and editing your own data. It covers making maps and beautiful maps and then Analysing Your Own Data in GIS, bringing it into the software, developing workflows and getting results and answer to your own questions. Once you're done with this, you'll have everything you need to know in order to be able to use GIS as an analyst. There's so much more you can know after this specialization, but you'll be very functional in GIS. If you do the verified certificate with Coursera, you get to do a Capstone project and walk away with a project that you completed all on your own. That could be a dataset, that could be a map or anything you want to explore to yourself. I encourage you to do that, as that's where you're going to get the most practice and experience. I'm really excited about this specialization and this course and I hope you are too. Let's go get started. [MUSIC]