The department of Remote Sensing and Geo-information Science grew out of the Teaching and Research Office of Cartography and Surveying set up in 1978. The work of the department mainly falls into broad areas of  Remote Sensing(RS), Geographical Information System(GIS), Global Positoning Syetem(GPS),  Photogrammetry , GIS software development, as well as ecological and environmental modeling. As one of the leading postgraduate major of GIS in China，the department was approved to confer both Master and Bachelor degree in 1981 and 1993 respectively. The undergraduate major of GIS has been honored as an excellent major by Shaanxi Province in 2002.
The department has a faculty of 12 members currently, among them, 3 are professors, 7 are associate professors, and 2 are lecturers. 6 of the members hold PhD degrees. For many years, the staff has been working to apply the technologies of Cartography, Surveying, RS and GIS in resources management and sustainable development in western China. Significant research results have been achieved in the fields such as GIS spatial analysis, digital image processing and information mining, soil and water conservation, ecological environment construction, as well as GPS applications.