GIS limitations for environmental modelling

In the early days of GIS, GIS had little to offer research scientists wanting to do environmental modelling because they did not have the functionality required and they were unable to integrate the model with the GIS. This meant that in a lot of cases GIS was used for data storage and presentation purposes only.

There are still some problems with the integration of environmental models and GIS, but in recent years GIS has become more sophisticated and more tailored towards environmental modelling purposes, and some integration is being established.