<P> The year 1960 saw the development of the world's first true operational GIS in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, by the federal Department of Forestry and Rural Development . Developed by Dr. Roger Tomlinson, it was called the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS) and was used to store, analyze, and manipulate data collected for the Canada Land Inventory--an effort to determine the land capability for rural Canada by mapping information about soils, agriculture, recreation, wildlife, waterfowl, forestry and land use at a scale of 1: 50,000 . A rating classification factor was also added to permit analysis . </P> <P> CGIS was an improvement over "computer mapping" applications as it provided capabilities for overlay, measurement, and digitizing / scanning . It supported a national coordinate system that spanned the continent, coded lines as arcs having a true embedded topology and it stored the attribute and locational information in separate files . As a result of this, Tomlinson has become known as the "father of GIS", particularly for his use of overlays in promoting the spatial analysis of convergent geographic data . </P> <P> CGIS lasted into the 1990s and built a large digital land resource database in Canada . It was developed as a mainframe - based system in support of federal and provincial resource planning and management . Its strength was continent - wide analysis of complex datasets . The CGIS was never available commercially . </P> <P> In 1964 Howard T. Fisher formed the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (LCGSA 1965--1991), where a number of important theoretical concepts in spatial data handling were developed, and which by the 1970s had distributed seminal software code and systems, such as SYMAP, GRID, and ODYSSEY--that served as sources for subsequent commercial development--to universities, research centers and corporations worldwide . </P>

Which of the following would be a type of application in which a gis could be used