Five modules connect technical methods with critical questions about data, algorithms, and environmental governance.
Technical goals: Find, access, and analyze large spatial datasets; build reproducible, cloud-native geospatial workflows.
Conceptual goals: Trace how biodiversity data shape biodiversity policy; interrogate data infrastructure through the lenses of history, power, and data justice.
Technical goals: Collect, clean, and explore large collections of policy text; use LLMs and computational text analysis to identify patterns across policy documents and public discourse.
Conceptual goals: Examine how language turns environmental ambitions into policy commitments; interrogate whose priorities and perspectives become legible in official and public discourse.
Technical goals: Formulate and test simple optimization problems; compare static optimization, dynamic adaptive decision making, and reinforcement learning.
Conceptual goals: Interrogate how objectives, constraints, and trade-offs encode values; evaluate algorithmic decisions through the lenses of ethics, transparency, and equity.
Technical goals: Turn causal questions into testable research designs; use difference-in-differences, event studies, and matched designs to estimate impacts.
Conceptual goals: Interrogate the assumptions behind causal claims; compare competing identification strategies and distributional outcomes.
Technical goals: Apply course methods to a policy-relevant question and produce a clear, reproducible analysis.
Conceptual goals: Synthesize evidence, critically evaluate the strengths and limitations of the chosen approach, and communicate findings to a policy audience.
Live coding session: discover satellite imagery through STAC catalogs and compute NDVI to analyze vegetation from the cloud.
Explore large geospatial datasets with cloud-native tools, connecting course readings to real data.
Connect the DuckDB Geo MCP server to GitHub Copilot and explore spatial datasets with plain English from VS Code.
Apply the tools and methods from the course to your own policy question. Guided work session with instructor support.