On November 1, 2018, the GIS day at Purdue celebrated its first decade. The 10th edition was held at the Stewart Center. Following the success of preceding editions, more than 355 students, faculties and staff from various department on campus, services and agencies from local community. Given the increasing number of attendees in the previous edition, the 2018 GIS day the latest was held in three rooms. The STEW 206 where the lightning talks, the keynote address and the presentation took place, room STEW 214 was dedicated to poster presentation, the display table, and the career lunch by professional from various areas using GIS was in Room STEW 279.
The keynote speaker for this first decade edition is Dr. Nicolas Picard, Forestry Officer of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Forestry department. Dr. Picard has 20 years of research experience in tropical forestry, having worked in Mali, Gabon and Cameroon. In his presentation, illustrate by real on site cases, he shows how GIS can be a powerful tool to improve governance like delimitation of forest units in Gabon, support economic feasibility in case of timber harvest optimization in Indonesia. Social inclusion in term of participatory approaches and environmental integrity like in the case study Mediterranean basin where GIS is used to manage forest genetic resources. After the keynote address, Dr. LaRue shows how canopy structure measurement with aerial LIDAR can be used to predict the wood production. Dr Kim Gallon talks about Race and Spatial Humanities, Dr Matei from College of Liberal Arts presents different ways a map can be interpreted in Spatial Humanity. Eric Adams, ITAP Research Computing presents various venue for efficient computer use.
As Purdue GIS Day traditions, career lunch and poster competition have attracted students from various departments across campus. The career lunch connects students with potential GIS employers. This year we invited GIS professionals from various county and state government agencies, industry and university departments. The panel included Kari Hicks from Duke Energy, Deborah Kuehn from Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Megan Compton he Indiana Geographic Information Officer, Mark Ehle the Tippecanoe county GIS administrator, Amanda O’Daniel of IEDC. Discussions centered on the topics students care most for career preparation. The poster competition not only allows students to present their GIS related projects, but also provides a fun way to recognize excellent studies. According to the judges, this year’s winners are:
- 1st place: Santiago Ruiz, Diversity and Economic Performance in Indiana from 2002 to 2016
- 2nd place: Shams R. Rahmani, Mapping Soil Spatial Variability at the Agronomy Center for Research and Education (ACRE) to Support Field-Based Phenotyping
- 3rd place: Jonathan A Knott, Shifts in forest composition in the eastern United States
We also host the Esri Development Center (EDC) Student of the Year Contest this year. It is an annual award open to all Purdue students, sponsored by Purdue Libraries Learning Council. The winner will be recognized as Student of the Year for outstanding achievements in development of innovative tools, applications or techniques using ArcGIS platform. This year the award goes to Sayan Dey for his work on watershed scale river channel morphology model: an ArcMap tool for automated generation of river channel geometry.
The GIS Day Conference is co-sponsored by the Purdue by the Purdue College of Agriculture and the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, The Graduate school at Purdue University, Purdue Honors College, Purdue Krannert School of Management, Purdue Polytechnic Institute, The Purdue College of Veterinary Medicine, and Purdue University Libraries.
The agenda for Purdue GIS Day 2018 is available here.
These are the tracks for the 2018 GIS Day.
- GIS to address questions in forest ecology and management
- My laptop takes forever, now what!
- Economic resilience and diversity in Indiana from 2002 to 2016
- How much do Purdue's trees weight? Estimating biomass in urban areas
- Economic resilience and concentration in Indiana over 2002-2016
- Is Corruption Influenced by Human Development Index and Transparency? A Global Spatial Assessment Using GIS
- Sustainable Environment: Nexus project
- Spatial Humanities
- GIS Applications
- UAS