土地覆盖和土地利用的变化是人与自然系统之间的关键接口。我们的科学家在遥感土地覆盖变化方面处于世界领先地位。该信息与人类社会经济数据积极结合，以研究过去的土地覆盖和土地利用变化，并为空间明晰的未来情景提供高级建模信息。这些方法正在积极地用于同时解决社会，经济，碳，气候，生物多样性和土地利用变化的其他方面。我们开发农业监控系统，并研究社会影响，适应以及对火灾，干旱，洪水，荒漠化和其他灾难性事件的脆弱性。地理科学系提供的研究生课程包括哲学博士，地理空间信息科学专业研究硕士学位，以及五年制的联合理学学士学位和地理
The Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland College Park, ranked 3rd out of 49 Geography Departments in the 2010 NRC Rankings. This is an outstanding achievement and confirms that Maryland Geography is one of the leading departments in the nation. The assessment also showed that Maryland Geography ranked first in the number of citations, indicating the broad level of recognition for our research publications. While members of the Department are involved in many of the mainstream concerns of the discipline, they are also responding to the new challenges and opportunities of earth system science, human dimensions of global change, global warming, population expansion and third-world development, to name but a few issues. Land cover and land-use change is a key interface between human and natural systems. Our scientists are world leaders in the remote sensing of land-cover changes. This information is actively combined with human socio-economic data to study past land cover and land use change and to inform advanced modeling of spatially-explicit future scenarios. These methods are actively being used to simultaneously address social, economic, carbon, climate, biodiversity and other aspects of land-use changes. We develop agricultural monitoring systems and look at societal impacts, adaptions and vulnerability to fire, droughts, floods, desertification, and other catastrophic events.