Mission Statement
 
The overall goal of the Spatial Analysis and Modeling (SAM) Laboratory is to describe, understand, model and predict environment and human change processes together with their interactions.

This focus integrates a number of research disciplines including spatial data analysis, GIS/GIScience, complex systems theory, remote sensing, and cartography.

Objectives
 
The objectives include the development of theory and implementations to model the dynamics of land use changes, urban growth, disease propagation, resources management, and human well-being.

Specific methods used include cellular automata, fuzzy logic and sets, exploratory spatial data analysis, data mining, web-based GIS, multi-criteria analysis and visualizations.