Monitoring change in the Earth’s surface over local, regional, and global scales in a comprehensive, synoptic manner regularly relies on remote-sensing imagery collected from platforms such as airplanes or satellites. The growing archive of currently-accessible satellite imagery, which now covers over four decades, continues to support the increasing need for more accurate and integrated information on global environmental change. The multi-temporal analysis of these data sets is now a crucial component of environmental monitoring and garnering more attention. At the ABMI, multi-temporal analysis plays an important role in monitoring Alberta’s human footprint and tracking changes in land cover across the province. As an organization fully involved in multi-temporal remote sensing for environmental monitoring, ABMI is a key player in MultiTemp 2013, which will be held in Canada for the first time this June, and will bring together Canadian and international researchers and practitioners from all areas of multi-temporal remote sensing, to share, exchange, and discuss their work and ideas on a variety of topics.
Currently, the ABMI will be represented by Remote Sensing Group members Greg McDermid, Guillermo Castilla, and Jennifer Hird, and by Executive Director, Kirk Andries. Both Greg (Technical Chair) and Guillermo (Local Organizing Committee) are heavily involved in the organization of the conference, and, along with Jennifer, will be presenting on a number of topics including relative change detection analysis techniques, and visualizing urban development and other landscape change on a broad scale across Alberta. Kirk will be a panelist in a very important discussion regarding remote sensing and environmental monitoring in Alberta’s oil sands.
The conference will be held at the Banff Centre, in Banff, AB from June 25 – 27, 2013. While presentations will cover a wide range of topics, more prominent topics will include: changing polar oceans and lands; natural hazard monitoring and identification; urban land-use planning; habitat conservation; and modeling, data mining, time series processing, and change-analysis techniques. In addition, three exciting plenary forums are scheduled for MultiTemp 2013: 1) an International Editors-in-Chief Forum, bringing together editors from the top remote sensing scientific journals; 2) an Oil Sands and Environmental Monitoring Panel, which will focus on the role of multi-temporal remote sensing and includes our very own Kirk Andries as a panelist; and 3) a Landsat Data Continuity and Science Panel, discussing the much-needed continuation of the Landsat archive with the new Landsat 8 satellite.
MultiTemp 2013 promises to be an excellent conference and a highlight for Alberta’s remote sensing community! Sponsored by the Canadian Remote Sensing Society and the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, and hosted by the University of Calgary and the Banff Centre, it is a ‘must’ for any who are involved in multi-temporal remote sensing. Early-bird registration is now open, and continues until the end of May. For more information, visit the MultiTemp 2013 website.