GIS-Pro 2024

Welcome to GIS-Pro 2024 and our super-sized opening session!
Hear from conference and URISA leadership about the not-to-miss highlights of the coming days.
Take every opportunity to celebrate the community, make connections, and share your thoughts and ideas with your fellow attendees. Don't pass up the chance to expand your professional support system this week!

Climate Resilience & GIS
Our opening keynote will focus on something we are all concerned with, particularly in coastal areas like Portland, Maine: Climate Change and Community Resilience. This session will be a discussion of the uses of GIS as a tool in Climate Resilience and Adaptation activities. The panelists represent a variety of organizations all working to define, prepare, and assist communities in their work to understand the issues facing them and to develop policies, actions, and responses to the changes ahead. GIS has become an important tool to bring together the disparate data, policies, agencies, and communities involved in these processes. The panel will discuss their work and thoughts on how GIS can and will be used as we move forward.

Jamie Carter, Northeast Region Geospatial Coordinator, NOAA, Portland, ME
Eileen Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME
Tora Johnson, Co-Director, Sustainable Prosperity Initiative, Sunrise Economic Council, Machias, ME
David Reidmiller, Director, Climate Center, Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Portland, ME

Why You Should Care About the NSDI
We'll follow that with an important discussion about the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), how local government can participate in the NSDI and its role in supporting local government. Emphasizing the critical importance of local data, the panel will discuss the role of local data to the NSDI, collaborative strategies for advancing the NSDI, the role of standards, and the way ahead for local governments and the NSDI.
Broad stakeholder involvement is crucial for defining roles, responsibilities, authoritative data content, and governance structures. Attendees will be challenged to actively engage and contribute to the conversation furthering the development and implementation of the NSDI. Local Governments can aid FGDC in determining the specific themes where local governments are the primary data developers and discuss how they interact with their state data stewards. By sharing insights, best practices, and opportunities for participation, the panel aims to advance a collaborative approach to implementing the NSDI that enhances urban planning, disaster response, resource management, and public services. Join us to play a part in shaping a more connected and data-driven future for the Nation.

Josh Delmonico, Executive Director, Federal Geographic Data Committee, Reston, Virginia
Lynn Dupont, Lynn Dupont, GISP, ASLA, GIS Manager/Principal Planner, New Orleans Regional Planning Commission, New Orleans, Louisiana
Curtis Pulford, Manager - Enterprise Geographic Information System, City of Phoenix, Arizona

This week flew by! Hopefully you learned a lot and will leave Portland with a boatload of solutions and ideas and a professional network that will be your support system throughout your career.

URISA and AI: A Look at This Latest Round of Information Technology-Driven Change
URISA has always been an organization focused on harnessing emerging information technologies to improve urban and regional planning. Over the decades, the URISA community has responded to multiple waves of technology-driven change -from computerizing census records in the 1960s all the way to distributed computing and location-based services in recent years. In many ways, AI, and especially large language models and generative AI, are just another wave of new tech. In many ways, the impact of AI on the URISA community looks familiar, but there are some differences worth noting. The talk will compare what is happening now with the impacts of previous technologies in order to draw some conclusions about where we are, what to expect, and what to prioritize.

We are honored to feature Joe Ferreira (Professor at MIT and URISA Past President) and Katie Picchione (Response Coordination Lead at NASA) to discuss this important and ever-evolving topic.

Annual Business Meeting
Then stick around for some closing comments from the conference leadership and attend URISA's Annual Business Meeting. We talked about the NSDI on Tuesday and will bookend that discussion with an updated from URISA's Policy Advisory Committee. Learn about URISA accomplishments over the past year, Board actions taken, and exciting plans for the future. Meet the new members elected to the URISA Board.