CSRS Presentation

I just returned from two nights at the Lord Nelson Hotel in Halifax. Yesterday, I gave a keynote presentation in an auditorium on the campus of Dalhousie University. The title was ‘Fifty years of GIS and RS at COGS’. It follows the transition from NSLSI to COGS to NSCC, Centre of Geographic Sciences.

There were several COGS graduates in the audience. The organizers of the 45th. Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing included Chris Hopkinson, Laura Chasmer and Koreen Millard; all with affiliations to COGS.

At the evening reception at Pier 21, both Hopkinson and Millard received awards for their contribution to the field of Remote Sensing.

Lessons learned from the conference.

Conferences are opportunities to share the results of faculty research and the efforts of their graduate students. The COGS model of applied research fits well in that context. Remarkably, the Remote Sensing community in Canada has been offering symposiums for forty-five years. This matches time-wise, with the Nova Scotia Remote Sensing Centre and applied research at COGS and, most recently, through the Applied Geomatics Research Group (AGRG) in Middleton.

My view of the future is that land management and climate change across Canada will depend on a strong cohort of both remote sensing and geographic information system scientists and technicians. These tools will provide us with a detailed understanding of the landscape, and its link to climate change.

This fits well with John Wightman’s original vision for COGS in 1975.

Acknowledgements

Both Edward Wedler and David Maclean made important contributions to the slides, with links and images.

References

Bob Maher, 2024, Fifty Years of GIS and RS at COGS (This link allows the reader to follow the presentation online).