Assessing professional benefits of GIS certification

ABSTRACT

The certification of geographic information system (GIS) professionals remains a contentious topic. After more than 25 years, the GIS community remains divided over the need to formally recognize GIS professionals who maintain standards of professional competency and conduct. Unfortunately, few studies have examined individuals who have become certified or the professional benefits of certification. This study explores GIS certification through a survey of 1731 geospatial professionals who became geographic information systems professionals (GISPs) between 2003 and 2014. A web-based questionnaire asked GISPs about the certification process, its influence on their compensation and advancement, and other issues. Quantitative and qualitative findings suggest that perceptions about certification fall along a wide spectrum with GISPs employed in private industry seeing fewer benefits compared with those employed in government or not-for-profit organizations. While a large number of respondents conveyed pride in completing the certification process, others expressed frustration over the program’s lack of visibility, standards that have enabled less qualified peers to become certified, and the slow progress at which GIS certification has achieved respect compared with programs administered in other fields such as engineering and planning.     

100,000-year-long terrestrial record of millennial-scale linkage between eastern North American mid-latitude paleovegetation shifts and Greenland ice-core oxygen isotope trends

We document frequent, rapid, strong, millennial-scale paleovegetation shifts throughout the late Pleistocene, within a 100,000+ yr interval (~ 115–15 ka) of terrestrial sediments from the mid-Atlantic Region (MAR) of North America. High-resolution analyses of fossil pollen from one core locality revealed a continuously shifting sequence of thermally dependent forest assemblages, ranging between two endmembers: subtropical oak-tupelo-bald cypress-gum forest and high boreal spruce-pine forest. Sedimentary textural evidence indicates fluvial, paludal, and loess deposition, and paleosol formation, representing sequential freshwater to subaerial environments in which this record was deposited. Its total age–depth model, based on radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence ages, ranges from terrestrial oxygen isotope stages (OIS) 6 to 1. The particular core sub-interval presented here is correlative in trend and timing to that portion of the oxygen isotope sequence common among several Greenland ice cores: interstades GI2 to GI24 (≈ OIS2–5 d). This site thus provides the first evidence for an essentially complete series of ‘Dansgaard–Oeschger’ climate events in the MAR. These data reveal that the ~ 100,000 yr preceding the Late Glacial and Holocene in the MAR of North America were characterized by frequently and dynamically changing climate states, and by vegetation shifts that closely tracked the Greenland paleoclimate sequence.