UC Riverside is renewing its contract with Esri with a new licensing agreement that will expand the availability of geospatial and mapping software to the campus.

The university has long had a relationship with the Redlands-based GIS technology giant and licensed its technology for use by students, staff, and faculty members in every college and school.

UCR will join the UCOP Esri Consortium, moving it to the systemwide institutional agreement that provides access to a wide variety of software products for teaching, research, and administrative uses.

The agreement increases the current pool of 5,900 active users to an allotment of 15,000.

“This gives access to all students who will need to use this service and gives UCR the ability to grow this service across all educational and research disciplines,” said Jeremy Meadows, UCR’s chief procurement officer.

Esri tools such as ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS are used by students for data science, visualization, and critical thinking skills in coursework and labs. Faculty members use ArcGIS StoryMaps to create interactive lecture material while researchers use advanced spatial statistics, machine learning, and raster analysis in ArcGIS to publish papers. Esri technology is used by staff members for a number of administrative and operational tasks.

For information on academic uses and creating an ArcGIS Online account visit the Center for Geospatial Sciences website https://spatial.ucr.edu/ or contact Janet Reyes, geospatial information librarian, at janetre@ucr.edu. For inquiries regarding Esri partnerships contact Maite Alday, senior executive director of corporate and foundation relations at maite.alday@ucr.edu