Pecora 21/ISRSE 38

Pecora 21/ISRSE 38

A joint meeting of the 21st William T. Pecora Memorial Remote Sensing Symposium (Pecora 21) and the 38th International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment (ISRSE-38) will convene in Baltimore, Maryland, USA from October 6 – 11, 2019. The combined conference will be hosted by NASA, NOAA and the USGS, with an overarching theme of “Earth Observation – Continuous Monitoring of Our Changing Planet: From Sensors to Decisions.”

Pecora 21 is the latest in a series of Symposia named after William T. Pecora, the USGS Director who helped initiate the Landsat program in the 1960s. The Pecora Symposium series was established by the USGS and NASA in the 1970s as a forum to foster the exchange of scientific information and results derived from applications of Earth observing data to a broad range of land-based resources, and to discuss ideas, policies, and strategies concerning land remote sensing. Pecora 21 will play host to a range of remote sensing experts and scientists from federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, universities and industry. The technical program will focus on both science and operational applications, emerging challenges and opportunities in working with Earth observations, and the role of partnerships in addressing scientific research, technical advancements and societal solutions. The William T. Pecora Award, presented annually to individuals or groups that make outstanding contributions toward understanding the Earth by means of remote sensing, will also be presented to the 2019 winners at a special session during the Symposium.

ISRSE convened for the first time in 1962 by the Willow Run Laboratories (later the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM)) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. ISRSE thus has the distinction of being the world’s first remote sensing conference. It is currently convened on a biennial basis by the International Centre on Remote Sensing of Environment (ICRSE) and the International Committee on Remote Sensing of the Environment (ICORSE) (a standing committee of the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing). ISRSE is widely acknowledged to be one of the most significant gatherings of the international remote sensing community. The Symposium attracts senior staff of space agencies and international Earth observation programs, and is renowned for its application focus in developed and developing countries thereby providing a global overview of advances in Earth observation and the consequential societal benefits.

The joint hosting of these two prestigious remote sensing meetings will afford many unique opportunities for interaction and collaboration among a diverse and international community of remote sensing experts and scientists.

Please direct all questions to the Meeting Coordinator * Priscilla Weeks at (301) 941-7102 or at [email protected]
When
10/6/2019 - 10/11/2019
Where
Baltimore Marriott Waterfront 700 Aliceanna Street Baltimore, MD 21202 UNITED STATES

Additional Registration Options

2-Hour Workshops

Description
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an imaging sensor that uses radio frequency waves. Similar to optical imagers, it can be used to map land use/cover and changes on the Earth surface. Main advantage of SAR over optical sensors is that it can acquire data independent of sun-light, under almost all weather conditions, penetrating clouds, and it can measure displacement in the satellite look direction very precisely. In the last decade, several radar imaging satellites have been launched, e.g. TERRASAR-X and TanDEM-X by Germany, COSMO-SKYMED by Italy, RADARSAT-2 and Radarsat Constellation Mission by Canada, ALOS-2 by Japan, and SENTINEL-1A/B by Europe. These satellites aid in applications such as natural resources monitoring (water, vegetation, agriculture and forest), and natural hazard mapping (landslide, earthquake, flooding etc.). Even though SAR systems have some advantages over optical sensors, their non-nadir imaging geometry, and radar specific imaging characteristics often confuse new users.  In this lecture, we will provide fundamentals of SAR systems, basics of imaging geometry, characteristics and impacts of resolution, wavelength and polarization. We will talk about SAR applications, and the impacts of target parameters such as dielectric constant, topography, penetration, and surface roughness. We will also cover the basics of pre-processing steps such as calibration, multilooking, speckle noise filtering, terrain correction and geocoding. We will highlight the operational SAR systems and their imaging parameters. Time series analysis of SAR data, and examples on damage mapping (change detection) as well as displacement mapping (interferometry) will be presented. The example data sets will be processed by a new cloud SAR processing environment called OpenSARLab, developed by ASF/UAF.
Category
2-Hour Workshops
Time
9:30 AM - 11:30 AM
10/6/2019 9:30 AM
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and interferometric SAR (InSAR) techniques and multiple-temporal SAR datasets have been widely and successfully used in Earth observation to study the ever-change environments. Examples include the global/national landuse and land cover, national land survey, agriculture, forestry, fishery, resource exploitation, environmental protection and monitoring, disaster prevention and mitigation, and national security. Therefore, the objectives of the workshop are to overview the state of the Earth observation using SAR with the focus on the development of SAR hardware and data analysis software, and eye-opening applications using time-series InSAR (TSInSAR) techniques and datasets.
Category
2-Hour Workshops
Time
9:30 AM - 11:30 AM
10/6/2019 9:30 AM
The U.S. Geological Survey's Earth Resources Observation and Science Center implemented a new capability titled LCMAP – Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection. This capability couples novel methodologies with all cloud free Landsat data from the 1980s forward to produce annual land-cover and land-change products readily available to the research community. The version 1 products are bundled into a suite of five land-cover products and five land-cover change products. The land-cover products are primary land cover, secondary land cover, primary land-cover confidence, secondary land-cover confidence, and annual land-cover change. The land-cover change products are time of spectral change, change magnitude, time since last change, spectral stability, and model quality. The workshop objectives include a brief introduction to LCMAP, a detailed description of each product in the suite, and a demonstration of product applications followed by an opportunity for participants to explore and interact with the products.  The product sample for the workshop is the entire suite for an area in central California (500 km x 500 km; 1985-2017). This workshop provides an environment for participants to interact and engage with others, including LCMAP scientists who can answer questions pertaining to data characteristics, format, and applicable uses.  Participants will benefit by gaining familiarity with the data and how LCMAP products can be applied in their research. LCMAP scientists encourage participants to share insight and provide feedback. Incorporating user experience benefits the broader research community by enhancing future product and tool development. Participants are required to have a laptop (minimum 5 GB storage) with image viewing and processing software installed (ERDAS Imagine, ArcGIS, QGIS). It is recommended that participants download  the LCMAP published sample data from the website provided prior to the workshop. This workshop is limited to 30 participants.
Category
2-Hour Workshops
Time
9:30 AM - 11:30 AM
10/6/2019 9:30 AM

4-Hour Workshops

Description
In the quest for managing and understanding Big Earth Data, datacubes have emerged as a paradigm for function-rich services on spatio-temporally aligned, homogenized raster data assets. Generally speaking, datacubes encompass spatio-temporal sensor, image (timeseries), simulation, and statistics data. For example, in Earth sciences we find 1-D sensor timeseries, 2-D satellite imagery, 3-D x/y/t image timeseries and x/y/z voxel data, as well as 4-D x/y/z/t climate and ocean model output. Typically, datacubes are rather large - today, we talk about multi-Terabyte to multi-Petabyte sizes.
Category
4-Hour Workshops
Time
8:30 AM - 12:30 PM
10/6/2019 8:30 AM
This workshop covers the common knowledge areas comprising a large portion of exam content for ASPRS Certification. It is valuable preparation for those who have never taken an ASPRS exam, as well as for those who have expertise in a particular specialty, such as lidar or UAS, but feel less prepared for the general knowledge component of the exam. This workshop will also explain the certification application process and the importance of certification in career development.
Category
4-Hour Workshops
Time
1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
10/6/2019 1:00 PM
This workshop teaches participants how to (1) utilize the ArcGIS Pro Image Analyst extension to conduct pixel- and object-based image classification using traditional (Support Vector Machine and Random Forests) machine learning algorithms; (2) build models for data preparation and experiment with different classification parameters; (3) Use the deeplab deep learning architecture for image segmentation (classification). Participants will be briefly introduced to necessary theoretical background information as well as practical implementation. Real world examples of wetland land cover classification will be used in the demonstration.
Category
4-Hour Workshops
Time
1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
10/6/2019 1:00 PM
Cloud-based image processing platforms bring unprecedented possibilities for remote sensing education, research and outreach. This workshop will have two parts; The first part will provide an interactive exploration of Google Earth Engine (GEE) capabilities with examples of projects demonstrating the use of GEE in education, undergraduate research and outreach. This will be followed by hands on activities including data exploration, supervised classification, and a hands-on activity. The second part will include more advanced topics of GEE that includes image processing, widget use and app building using an API based coding environment. Each participant will get at 4 GEE activities for classroom use and several GEE API scripts that the participants can modify for their own use.
Category
4-Hour Workshops
Time
1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
10/6/2019 1:00 PM
Earth and environmental sciences are more collaborative and increasingly depend upon diverse and growing collections of remote sensing, ground observation, and modeled data products in addressing research, decision-support, and public communication needs. This increasingly complex data environment, both in terms of the data that are being used and produced, when combined with requirements for more effective documentation and communication based on those data, requires that Earth scientists explicitly plan for and execute effective data management through the both the research and data lifecycle. This workshop will provide an introduction, grounded in Earth science, of the work that must be done to first plan for effective data management, analysis, documentation, preservation, and sharing; and second translate that plan into high-impact research and data products that will maintain that impact well beyond the life of a specific research project. Throughout the workshop connections to additional training materials within the Earth Science Information Partners Data Management Training Clearinghouse* will be highlighted, providing an opportunity for workshop participants to continue their learning well beyond the workshop session presented at the ISRSE meeting.
Category
4-Hour Workshops
Time
1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
10/6/2019 1:00 PM

Guest Passes

Description
Category
Guest Passes
10/8/2019
Category
Guest Passes
10/9/2019
Category
Guest Passes
10/10/2019

Single Day Registrations

Description
Category
Single Day Registrations
10/7/2019
Category
Single Day Registrations
10/7/2019
Category
Single Day Registrations
10/8/2019
Category
Single Day Registrations
10/8/2019
Category
Single Day Registrations
10/9/2019
Category
Single Day Registrations
10/9/2019
Category
Single Day Registrations
10/10/2019
Category
Single Day Registrations
10/10/2019
Category
Single Day Registrations
10/11/2019
Category
Single Day Registrations
10/11/2019

Social Events

Description
Category
Social Events
10/10/2019

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