ESRI Executive Supporting Global Tracking Tool for COVID-19
Lawrie Jordan, graduate of UGA’s College of Environment and Design (CED) Class of
1973, is currently a senior executive at Esri, a high-tech company headquartered in
Redlands, California whose technology has been instrumental in creating GIS tools
to track the global spread of the novel coronavirus. These tools take the form of
dynamically-updated dashboards containing valuable information detailing locations
of confirmed active cases, deaths, recoveries, and more. Data come from the WHO and
Johns Hopkins University. According to Jordan, the site leverages the power of geographic
science and location analytics, and currently gets over one billion hits per day.
After graduating from UGA with a BA in Landscape Architecture in 1973, Jordan received his master’s in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, along with fellow UGA graduate Bruce Rado. A few short years later, Jordan and Rado founded the software company ERDAS, which became an industry leader in processing satellite imagery to show global changes in the environment.
It was at the Harvard GSD that the two met Esri founder and fellow Landscape Architect Jack Dangermond, and ERDAS and Esri became key strategic business partners for more than 20 years until Jordan and Rado sold their company and retired in 2001. Jordan came out of retirement in 2008 to become Esri’s Corporate Director of Imagery and Remote Sensing and Special Assistant to Jack Dangermond.
Both UGA and Harvard have played key roles in the evolution of Landscape Architecture education over the last 100 years. When Frederick Law Olmsted founded the first school of Landscape Architecture in the U.S. at Harvard in 1901, he challenged students to be “Stewards of the Environment”. UGA adopted Olmsted’s resilient vision in their Landscape Architecture program from its early beginning in 1929 in Athens, and that vision is flourishing today across multiple programs at CED.
Similarly, Esri has adopted this role of stewardship under founder/Landscape Architect Dangermond since its beginning in 1969. A disaster response team has been in operation at Esri for over 25 years, aiding first responders and other emergency personnel with wildfires, floods, and disease (such as the 2014 Ebola crisis).
In response to the coronavirus pandemic, Esri transitioned all their employees to remote work and greatly expanded their disaster response team, providing constant updates, predictive analytics, and more to those who need it most. Today, Esri is active in and supports more than 150 countries, and its software is used in over 7,000 schools and universities.
Esri's logo, from esri.com
Jordan also understands that part of the responsibility as a “steward of the environment” is giving back. This philosophy can be seen in the scholarships he and Rado set up for UGA and Harvard students, as well as Esri’s generous provision of tools such as theCovid-19 Dashboard.
CED is proud to have alumni like Jordan and Rado working to, as Jordan puts it, “evolve the profession” of Landscape Architecture with a new view and a new vision towards a “central nervous system for the planet”. By harnessing the constant stream of data for a worthwhile purpose helping others, Landscape Architects are not just stewards of the environment, but stewards of the globe.