Released May 20, 2008

BETHESDA, Md. -- The ASPRS 2008 Annual Conference was held April 28 – May 2 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Nearly 1500 attended the many conference activities.

This year’s conference, Bridging the Horizons: New Frontiers in Geospatial Collaboration, opened with the Keynote Address given in a panel format by a group of geospatial industry leaders who discussed their opinions of where the industry is heading and what can be done to prepare for the future. The panelists were Peter Becker, product manager of ESRI; Tina Cary, president of Cary and Associates; Lewis Graham, president and chief technical officer, GeoCue Corporation; Terrence Keating, senior vice president and CTO, Aero-Metric, Inc. and George Southard, vice president Americas, Digital Imaging, ERDAS. The panel was moderated by industry expert, Mike Renslow, Renslow Mapping Services. An audio recording of this presentation is available at http://www.asprs.org/portland08. An audience of more than 600 found this panel discussion very timely.

Workshops

Fourteen workshops, many filled to capacity, were offered on the two days preceding the conference, and covered a wide array of topics including Professional Airborne Digital Mapping Systems – An Overview; Topics in Orthophoto Production; Thermal Remote Sensing, Becoming a SAR User, Hysperspectral Image Processing and Feature Extraction: Geospatial Information Retrieval, and Remote Sensing of Wetlands, as well as a specially designed workshop for those seeking ASPRS certification.

General session

A General Session opened the conference on Thursday with presentations by Kass Green, ASPRS president, who spoke on Increasing ASPRS’s Impact in a Time of Global Climate Change and James Plasker, ASPRS executive director, who gave a report on the State of the Society. Both of these talks are available on line at http://www.asprs.org/portland08.

Student Advisory Council of ASPRS

The Student Advisory Council of ASPRS took a very active role in this year’s conference for the first time by organizing, and moderating seven sessions directed at students and young professionals. These included such subjects as “Getting a Job,” “Successfully Entering the Workforce,” “Scholarships and Grants,” “Organizing and Constructing a Scientific Paper,” “Grammar for Educated Writers of Scientific English,” and “The Publication Process – From Submission to Print.”

Technical papers

Nearly 300 technical papers covered many diverse topics including Satellite Imagery, Natural Resource Applications, Geospatial Data Accuracy/Error Assessment, Feature-based Registration, Geophysical Applications, Geographic Information Science Licensing Issues, Environmental/Public Health Applications, Photogrammetric Triangulation Models, Vegetation Dynamics, Photogrammetric DEM Extraction, and Invasive Species Mapping were presented.

Hot topics

A very popular feature at the ASPRS Annual Conference for a third year was the Hot Topics segment. This is an open discussion, one-hour format, for all conference attendees. A poll taken approximately 90 days before the conference of the then registered attendees identified the topics they wished to discuss. The most requested were The Voyages of the Starship “Enterprise GIS;” Advances in Global Earth Observation: From Landsat Forward; The Need for K-12 Remote Sensing and GIS Education;, Geospatial Professional Guidelines; and, Advantages of Simultaneous Aerial Lidar/Imagery Acquisition. These sessions were all very well attended.

Founded in 1934, ASPRS is an international professional organization of 6,000 geospatial data professionals. ASPRS is devoted to advancing knowledge and improving understanding of the mapping sciences to promote responsible application of photogrammetry, remote sensing, geographic information systems and supporting technologies. For additional information about ASPRS, visit our web site at http:/www.asprs.org.

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http://www.asprs.org/news/index.html

Contact: Anna Marie Kinerney, 301-493-0290 ext.106, akinerney@asprs.org