Four colleges at the University have been given free software to advance the learning resources of faculty and students.

University alumnus Matt Heric, donated 114 copies of his company’s GeoGenesis software to the University in April.

“Philosophically, it comes to supporting faculty and students on campus,” Heric said, CEO of IAVO Research and Scientific, based in Durham, N.C., in a phone interview Monday. “If there aren’t classroom resources and you’re paying good tuition but don’t have access to what’s the latest and greatest, you’re not getting the complete spectrum of the educational experience,” he said.

The software, valued at $16,000 per copy, generates 3-D content on the computer from satellite images and aerial photographs.

An upper-division geography course is using the software to calculate the volume of fuel fires using digital photographs. Part of the experiment is learning if the software is general enough to accept digital images and still create a 3-D construction of the terrain, said Tommy Jordan, who teaches the course and is associate director of the Center for Remote Sensing and Mapping Science, in a phone interview Monday.

“The company that does the GeoGenesis is very responsive,” Jordan said. “One of the reasons they’re giving us the software is to learn how to use it and help them figure out how to improve it.”

His class, a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students, recently traveled to South Georgia to perform ground surveys and take digital photographs of rare long leaf pine forests, using a fork lift. Next week, the class will use GeoGenesis software for the first time to analyze the images. The terrain area the class is covering requires periodic fires to remain healthy.

“There’s a field of research called fire ecology. We want to add to that to give them some information to use to model fire behavior,” he said. “We’re doing everything ourselves. It’s real. It makes the class incredibly cool. The students are 100 percent participating in everything.”

The software can be used to model and monitor any type of terrain, such as earthquakes, volcanoes and coastal changes, Jordan said. It can also be used for landslide analysis or building modeling.

Almost every major of study could find a use for the software, Heric said.

“We told the administration that our intent is that if any student wants access to the software, there’s a license for them to use,” Heric said. “Likewise, if any researcher wants to use it for their research, let’s make sure they have access to the license.”

Although students and faculty have easy access to the software, it requires training, said Will Willimon, regional director for the Office of Development, in a phone interview Monday. Six professors received online training from the IAVO company in August, Willimon said.

As part of the gift, Heric said the company will provide five years of free technical support for the software.

“Geographic information systems is exploding on the marketplace,” Heric said. “There are always new tools to add, because new national standards are introduced. So we have to keep increasing the sophistication of the software.”

The GeoGenesis software copies have been divided among the College of Environment and Design, the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and the Department of Geography within the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.