Dangermond, Esri's president, works at its headquarters in Redlands, California. He founded the company to perform land-use analysis; however, its focus evolved into GIS-software development, highlighted by the release of ARC/INFO in the early 1980s. The development and marketing of ARC/INFO positioned Esri with the dominant market share among GIS-software developers. Esri's flagship product, ArcGIS, traces its heritage to Dangermond's initial efforts in developing ARC/INFO.
In December 2017, Jack and Laura Dangermond donated $165 million to establish the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve on the Pacific coast—the largest ever gift to The Nature Conservancy.[6][7]
In January 2020, Jack and Laura Dangermond donated $3 million to the Museum of Redlands fund.[9]
In 2005, Jack helped Duane Marble establish the American Association of Geographers Marble Fund for Geographic Science.[10] This fund serves to advance GIScience education by providing awards to undergraduate and graduate student research.[10] These awards include the "Marble-Boyle Undergraduate Achievement Award," "William L. Garrison Award for Best Dissertation in Computational Geography," and the "Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master's Research in Quantitative Geography."[11][12][13]
Geographic information science – scientific discipline that studies the techniques to capture, represent, process, and analyze geographic informationPages displaying wikidata descriptions as a fallback