More Learning Opportunities

My office is currently hosting a remote sensing conference. We hold it every two years and I participated in my first one during 2004. They used to hold them in various places throughout the country but have decided that holding it is SLC makes the most sense. It's a good conference because it pulls together most the people who do remote sensing in the Forest Service and other federal land management agencies. There's always a good fire track, so there are opportunities to learn and present new information.

A few things I appreciated and learned from this year's conference:

1. 40% of the entire Forest Service budget goes to wildland fire suppression. Therefore, the use of GIS and remote sensing continue to play a visible and important role in everything fire-related (active fire mapping, post-fire effects, etc.).
2. DigitalGlobe is changing their business plan to do more speculative collections instead of relying so much on "customer calls in and orders a single image over location X,Y." This could be good for many applications, but won't work for fire. However, with the recent launch of WorldView1, the availability of Quickbird increased (I guess NGA just uses WorldView1...).
   
3. The Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) can be a great sensor to use in many forestry applications. The key thing about DMC is the "C" in their name: constellation. They have 4 of the exact same sensors that fly in the same orbit and allow for global coverage every 4 days at 32 meter spatial resolution. I asked them for imagery of a fire in Alaska a few years ago but they missed the spot and got me an image of Anchorage instead. But their representative makes a good argument for the sensor's use...

During the middle of this conference, I made a quick trip up to Spokane for a BAER meeting. I've been asked to be a "trainer" at an annual BAER team leader refresher. This training is always between Regions 1, 4, and 6 (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah) and in various locales throughout the NW. It was in La Grande, OR, Missoula, MT, and now Spokane, WA this week. It was a quick trip but I am realizing that I really enjoy supporting the BAER community and their unique needs.