The Cartography and Remote Sensing Study Program is a study program that was established in the late 1960s as the Cartography Department, followed by the establishment of the Remote Sensing Department in 1979 as a continuation of the national collaboration between Gadjah Mada University and the National Coordinating Agency for Surveys and Mapping (BAKOSURTANAL) regarding the establishment of PUSPICS (Center for Education in Remote Sensing Image Interpretation and Integrated Survey) in 1976. The center aimed to support BAKOSURTANAL’s primary task in inventorying and evaluating national natural resource data using remote sensing technology. Subsequently, from 1985 to 1992, these two departments merged into the Technical Geography Department, overseeing the Cartography Study Program and the Remote Sensing Study Program. In 1993, these two study programs merged into the Cartography and Remote Sensing Study Program (KPJ), under the Department of Cartography and Remote Sensing.
From 1996 to 2002, the Cartography and Remote Sensing Study Program, along with three other study programs in the Faculty of Geography—Physical Geography, Human Geography, and Regional Development Planning—merged into one study program named the Geography Study Program. This was in response to a directive from the Directorate General of Higher Education, which required all undergraduate Geography education to be consolidated under a single study program named Geography. During this period, Cartography and Remote Sensing became one of the majors under the Geography Study Program, under Decree No. 221/DIKTI/Kep/96. In 1998, the Geography Study Program, which included the Cartography and Remote Sensing major, received an “A” accreditation from the National Accreditation Board for Higher Education (BAN-PT) through Decree No. 00762/Ak-I/UGMBO/VIII/1998. In 2002, through Rector of UGM Decree No. 31/P/SK/HKTI/2002, the Cartography and Remote Sensing major separated again to become its own independent study program under the name Cartography and Remote Sensing Study Program.
In 2006, as a state-owned legal entity university, the Ministry of National Education issued Decree No. 1/2006, granting Gadjah Mada University the authority to organize (open and close study programs). In response to this decree, in 2007, the Faculty of Geography conducted an internal reorganization, and the study programs were rearranged. The Cartography and Remote Sensing Study Program, together with the Regional Development Study Program, were placed under a new department named the Department of Geographic Information Science and Regional Development. The other department was the Department of Environmental Geography, overseeing a new study program called Geography and Environmental Science, which was a merger of the Geography, Physical Geography, and Human Geography study programs.
The most recent change regarding the status of the Cartography and Remote Sensing Study Program occurred in November 2015. The Cartography and Remote Sensing Study Program once again became an independent program and was placed under the management of the Department of Geographic Information Science. This was established through Rector of UGM Decree No. 1616/P/SK/HT/2015 concerning the Organizational Structure and Governance (SOTK) of the UGM Faculty of Geography, dated November 30, 2015.