Esri User Conference 2021 Virtual

In the plenary session held on Monday at the Virtual Esri User Conference 2021, Esri President Jack Dangermond spoke of focusing on creating a more sustainable environment for our planet. Users of Esri software and services come from 130 countries and different fields.

Jack reviewed the various types of work users are engaged in such as the NTIA Interactive Digital Broadband Map for the U.S. He said that we have a potential of a digital divide because communities are not connected to a wider network. In law enforcement, they are looking at past historic crime rates to see patterns. They’re looking at school threats, all the way to monitoring global security risk.

In reviewing the products and services, ArcGIS supports three fundamental types of systems:

System of insight (analytics), system of engagement (apps and maps), system of record (transactions). These create useful technology to create complete, comprehensive geospatial platforms supporting multiple communities. It is also an integrated system, supporting teams, individuals, organizations and communities. As it turns out, ArcGIS users are increasingly using the cloud and SaaS resources and platform as a service.

ArcGIS has an open architecture, is interoperable, with open APIs and open data, so users can integrate the systems into a broader architecture.

ArcGIS includes ready-to-use content, petabytes of basemaps, imagery, demographics and thematic content from sources such as ArcGIS Living Atlas with new or improved, NGDA open datasets, enhanced OSM layers, analysis-ready imagery, global demographics and 2020 land cover,  2020  land cover projections, biodiversity, air quality, wildfire risk and much more. The

High Resolution Global Land Cover 2020 was built in collaboration with the National Geographic Society, Microsoft with their planetary computer and Impact Observatory.

Improved tools and workflows have been added to desktop mapping and cartography.

Interactive web mapping is faster, intuitive and self-service, including a new map viewer.

Instant apps are new this year to transform web maps into apps.

Dashboards provide dynamic real time visualization about any subject. With new table visualization dashboards can be implemented on your favorite device.

StoryMaps are an integrated storytelling platform and are exponentially growing, with millions published and 3,000+ new stories a day, with millions of viewers per day.

Embedded mapping directly integrates ArcGIS maps into other products such as Microsoft 365, Autodesk, Amazon, SAS and Adobe.

Interactive visual analytics is intuitive spatial data exploration with ArcGIS Insights.

There are many new tools in spatial analysis and data science, including GeoAI – what Esri calls machine learning, deep learning and AI.

“We’ve also integrated this technology open science ecosystems in the world of GeoAI, rapidly being used by users,” said Jack. “We can do feature extraction off imagery, creating feature layers and change layers automatically.”

Imagery and Remote Sensing is a comprehensive and integrative system, involving map and data production, visualization and exploitation, management and dissemination and analysis.

Users can load imagery into ArcGIS Online and host it in a SaaS environment in the cloud, then serve it out as image services integrated into other work being done.

Drone Mapping includes planning, managing, collecting and processing with complete desktop and SaaS services. Site Scan (Cloud)  and Drone2Map desktop reality capture are included.

3D Visualization and Analysis advances 3D GIS into immersive experiences, BIM integration, voxels, 3D web editing and interactive analysis. One can now integrate 3D BIM models from Autodesk into their visualization.

A new product coming out in the fall called GeoBIM, will be a combo of GIS and BIM, that can point at a feature in a 2D or 3D scene and automatically bring up the document. This dynamic relationship can be the platform for creating a new class of apps, bringing the AEC community to the GIS community and vice versa. This product will dynamically link ArcGIS features to documents in Autodesk.

Real time visualization and analytics ingests data and bringing it into other data types. This involves integrating sensors, IoT and GIS.

ArcGIS Enterprise, an GIS infrastructure for organizations, provides data management and editing and allows integrating GIS with cloud data warehouses and big data kinds of operations such as the upcoming Google Cloud Support and Cloud Data Warehouses (Big Query and Snowflake).

The implementation of ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes for cloud native architecture means Esri takes a piece of software like Enterprise and breaks it up into different micro services. and you can deploy these on different computers within the cloud environment. “This means I can really scale out technology to deal with large numbers of users or high computation,” said Jack. “This isn’t for everyone but it is for those who want to take advantage of Kubernetes and its scalability. It may be good for AWS and Azure and those who use the Red Hat Open environment.”

ArcGIS Online, with 10 million+ users, is in the SaaS environment, with trillions of maps made out of this environment.

ArcGIS Solution lies on top of other products, that you can download and implement into your organizations. It is very easy to deploy completely supported like other software products, freely disseminated, and became very valuable during Covid, when solutions needed to be deployed quickly.

ArcGIS Hub supports engagement and collaboration for organizing initiatives, teams and activities.

What’s next for Esri technology?

• 2021 release with dot releases
• Continuously improving SaaS offerings.

The Urgency for a Sustainable Future

The theme of the Esri User Conference 2021 was “GIS: creating a sustainable future.” President Jack Dangermond talked about how this theme was inspired by Mario Palma’s book Why inegi? who said that lack of understanding of our reality is one of the greatest risks that our society is facing.

He also said, “our future depends upon creating and applying that understanding.”

These were the beacons that started inegi, but are beacons that address the work done by Esri users – creating and applying understanding.

Geologists are beginning to call this the “Anthropocene epoch,” as human activities are beginning to dominate.

Human induced climate change and over population are resulting in interconnected patterns of change, steep declines in biodiversity, and many other factors. Humans are living recklessly without regard for the environment.

“If we want to change to become more sustainable we need to change and make a commitment to life, and our future and must act now,” said Jack. “Many things can be done: restoring efficiencies, reducing pollution, looking at it geographically. It requires we see the world as one single ecosystem. Geography provides the science and the language of our world to be able to do this. It helps organize and integrate all the factors like environmental factors like biodiversity and integrate with social systems, illuminates patterns and relationships and helps us to provides a framework for understanding and applying our knowledge.”

Jack Dangermond calls it the “geographics approach” – a way of thinking and problem solving, that integrates geographic science and information into how we understand and manage our planet. It’s a holistic approach that brings sciences together, it is supported and enriched by spatial understanding and is also collaborative.  The idea is supporting multiple objectives: solution creating, and is inclusive and multi-disciplinary in its nature. “My great hope and vision is that this will impact every segment of society going forward. This approach supports powerful methodologies – GeoAnalytics: creating insight and understanding; GeoVisualization through maps and visualization, for communicating the content and context of our world; GeoDesign, designing sustainable futures; GeoCollaboration, engaging all the stakeholders – setting up all the economic factors, set up in a balanced way – GeoAccounting. GeoScience and Understanding can support our future, planning, and decision making. GIS enables the geographic approach, the very tools you use for measuring, visualizing, analyzing and making predictions.:

GIS technology is advancing rapidly as one of the tools that can help with sustainability. These include cloud computing, advanced analytics, integration of imagery and remote sensing, interactive mapping, 3D visualization, and remote sensing. GIS is also increasingly becoming interconnected, and creating geospatial infrastructure.

Connecting our systems is helping us collaborate and share. It’s transforming workflows and decision making at many scales. Billions of maps from users created a nervous system for sustainability.

The pervasiveness of web apps, and massive mobile deployments are just some of the ways GIS is being distributed.

“Geospatial is becoming embedded in other large IT systems, like Microsoft , Amazon, Autodesk it is really integrating geospatial thinking into the apps that non-GIS users use across the organization. We can now pull from massive data sets and create understanding. Big data integration is going to open our eyes, let us see new relationships we never understood before. The ability to access these systems from transactional data and imagery, link them to the same tools you’re using, will create new forms of understanding.”

A Walk Through the Anthropocene

Another perspective of the “Anthropocene” and the urgency to address climate change was presented on Day 2 by Paul Salopek, Founder and National Geographic Explorer, Out of Eden Walk. Paul Salopek is walking around the world, experiencing firsthand changes in migration, diminishing resources and conflict. He talked about what it’s like to transect the world 30 inches per strides, 3 miles per hour.

He began his walk in the “cradle of humankind,” Africa which he began in January 2013, using the medium of walking to connect what his project represents: both art and science. The path was to walk the path of the original dispersal of humans across the world all the way from the mother continent to the tip of South America which is said to be one of the last horizons our ancestors saw.

Paul plans to travel 24,000 miles, 70 million footsteps, will take 14 or 15 years of his life. He’s in year 8 and speaking from Shanghai, China. China should take 18 months to walk across.

The topic of sustainability naturally comes up on his walk: how do we survive together as we inch toward an unknown future? Mass migrations are triggered by the need for resources, safety, etc. He has walked through all these stories and headlines. The idea of the walk is to see how these stories and issues are connected.  How an economic story might be connected to a political story. How an education story might be connected to climate change or to conflict. “If you pull hard enough on any story then you hear that story is connected to a story that is connected to another story, and so on,” said Paul. “Now our fates are more interconnected than ever. Humanity altering nature more than ever before, navigate sustainability, into a new millennium.”

This kind of “tensegrity” approach to stories is intriguing. So far he has walked 11,000 miles and has some stories from the people he encountered along the way. The Afar pastoralists of Northern Ethiopia, for example, move their animals up and down the Rift Valley of Africa, in a part of the world which is undergoing enormous climate change. Rains are more unpredictable, pasture lands are shriveling up, water holes drying up, their entire economy of moving animals across the arid landscape is becoming untenable and pushing them into cities. “These people walk 20-30 miles a day across arid landscape, they are always alert looking for clouds, so wherever there are clouds on the horizon, there is rainfall and there will be green grass for their animals by the time they reach that area. They also barely lift their feet as they walk. I felt it was an eternal walk that will keep them going despite narrowing resources, far into the future.”

On the Silk Road, historically societies were crossroads of ideas and art that made their societies blossom, and during medieval times they became global centers of culture and learning, the golden age of Islamic learning. All of those places are now preserved as archaeological sites or rubble. In the 10^th century, they were no longer receptive to outside ideas or people. The lesson today is that this closing in, with walls going up instead of coming down, is what we experience in today’s increasingly polarized world, foreshadowing a limited future.

In the late 1960s, India initiated the Green Revolution that introduced GMOs, high yield crops, and fossil fuels to pump groundwater, and now the aftereffect of that Green Revolution is that they are in the most serious water crisis in the world, and water quality is highly compromised by chemicals. 600 million people are affected. 200,000 people die per year from it. So far local communities are being sustainable with the resources they have; capturing surface water, adapting old crops better adapted to drought conditions.

For many organizations, the last year has been devoted to figuring out how to create engaging material for online conferences, among other things. I would like to say that this year’s online conference was beautifully envisioned. The live streamed presentations made it feel almost like you were there, and it was easy to access all the recordings. As a press attemdee. I was given my own personal StoryMap, an integrated storytelling platform, which in and of itself is a great experience. I’m looking forward to so many presentations to watch from this year’s event.

Tags: ArcGIS, climate change, cloud, data, ESRI, geospatial, GIS, Google, imagery, indoor mapping, Infrastructure, intelligence, location, mapping, maps, mobile, mobile mapping, navigation, reality modeling, satellite imagery

Categories: 3D Cities, analytics, ArcGIS, ArcGIS Earth, ArcGIS Online, asset management, Autodesk, Building Information Modeling, citizen science, climate change, cloud, cloud network analytics, conversion, Covid-19, data, disaster relief, drones, earthquakes, emergency response, field GIS, geocoding, geospatial, GIS, Google, government, GPS, lidar, location based sensor fusion, location based services, location intelligence, mapping, Open Source, public safety, remote sensing, resilient cities, satellite based tracking, satellite imagery, sensors, utilities, wildfire risk

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