GIS has come a long way! It has been 25 years since the first AWRA GIS & Water Resources Conference and the very term "GIS" doesn't mean the same thing as it did back then. Data, tools, models and good cartography are still incredibly important. Many of us still perform much of our geospatial work on desktops. But ---- we've moved well beyond desktops to the cloud, to decision making and water-based applications that are integral to ecology and society --- well beyond floodplain mapping!
As GIS has changed, our biennial GIS and Water Resources conference is changing too! If you haven't attended this conference before: This is the 10th in a series of conferences designed around geospatial solutions to water resources related problems. Innovative water resources scientists, engineers, modelers, software designers from the public/government agencies, academic and private sectors convene to exchange ideas, compare challenges and solutions. If your aquatic research, management, and conservation involves process models, geo-referenced field data, remote sensing, or geo-statistical models then this is the venue to show that work. We've taken a slightly different tack for 2018 by having two Technical Program Co-Chairs. Dr. Dan Ames of Brigham Young University (BYU) is well-known to regulars of this conference and brings his expertise and interests in GIS-based water resources modelling, open source GIS, and web apps. Dr. Mike McManus of EPA, Office of Research and Development is a fairly new member of our tribe. He organized two very successful topical sessions with an ecological focus for the 2016 AWRA GIS & Water Resources conference that was held in Sacramento, solidifying a place in our community for geospatial water-based analyses involving ecology. Our Topical Sessions Chair, Dr. Norm Jones, of BYU, has a long history of GIS-based hydrologic modelling and helped co-author the Arc Hydro Groundwater tools. He is actively fielding topical session ideas ranging from remote sensing application to water resources, Ele-Hydro, drones, watershed conservation, and the National Water Model. Rest assured, the National Hydrography Dataset and NHDPlus, climate change, flood modeling and all the regular topics will be well represented!