GIS and ecology

I've had three classes so far in my semester of GIS at PPCC. It struck me, looking at my last post, that re-doing Ahlefeldt's dissertation with GIS is a needed update, and could be done after I've had a few more semesters. I need a little programming to write the algorithms (or maybe ArcGIS will do this already) and the statistics to look for correlations between geology, geomorphology, soils, and climate in the Palmer Divide. In 1992, ESRI software was very expensive (not cheap now, however), and I'm not sure if students at CSU then had access to it at all. Now, at PPCC GIS students get a one year license for ArcGIS desktop as part of their tuition. It seems like this type of analysis is really the only way of doing things now.