Topics Webinar | EO&GEO Series: GIS Day

On Wednesday, 15 November 2023, MDPI, ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information and Remote Sensing, organized the webinar titled “Topics Webinar | EO&GEO Series: GIS Day".

This year, the GIS day was celebrated organizing a special webinar by this MDPI open access journal to raise awareness about the importance of geospatial science and technology and its application. The webinar was very successful. We had three distinguished scholars from Australia and the USA who delivered the presentation.

The first speaker was Dr Yongze Song from Curtin University who delivered a presentation on the topic titled " The Second Dimension Spatial Association: Concepts and Application". He discussed novel approaches to improve the prediction accuracy and explained the outputs comparing it with current machine learning models (such as random forest). He also showed the application of R packages, e.g., SecDim. The second speaker was Professor Wenwen Li, and her presentation topic was on " The power of GeoAI in Earth and Environmental Science". She illustrated the application of GeoAI for rescue operation, Arctic permafrost research, and flood mapping. She also discussed about the power of GeoAI and the challenges in undertaking multi-source and multi-model challenges. She further discussed about the emerging research question " how can we trust results from GeoAI". The last speaker was Professor Dr Marguerite Madden, and her webinar topic was titled " Mitigating Human - Elephant Conflict in Southern Africa using Geo Spatial Analysis of Bull Elephant Movement". She entertained participants by discussing about the outputs of one of research project which was undertaken in Kruger National Park, South Africa, in the mid 1990s when the application of GPS technology was just started. She highlighted the outputs of a current research project which is running in African countries. The key message from her presentation was that although we have developed many technologies and technical solutions, we still need human engagement and community participation for the success of any research project.

At the end of the presentation, there was a Q/A session that was very interesting. The panel members answered the questions raised by participants. The webinar was closed by the chair Dr Dev Raj Paudyal, who highlighted the key outputs. This webinar program was facilitated by You Wu from MDPI.

The webinar was hosted via Zoom and required registration to attend. The full recording can be found below. In order to learn about future webinars, you can sign up to our newsletter by clicking “Subscribe” at the top of the page.