SCGIS NY/NJ

  As the outdoors season progressed, we became increasingly restless and started envisioning long-awaited in-person meetings and hikes. The organizers met last week in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen district for a happy-hour catching-up and planning get-together, which proved to be especially productive since we now have two set upcoming events and a couple of other ones in work: A hike! We are excited to explore Harriman State Park, and our colleagues in the Hudson Valley Chapter might join us. A conference after-party at Flute Midtown. Discuss the online annual conference proceedings happening this year between July 6 and 8. What are the benefits of joining SCGIS? What inspired you? What would you like to see and learn about, and what technical workshops you would find most useful? Join this networking event to find out. We are also announcing the launch of our Instagram account where we will host photos and videos taken during our events. There are at least two other hikes p

This Wednesday we are holding our second online joint meeting, spearheaded by the Hudson Valley Chapter. To receive the agenda and meeting link, join our mailing list (click the three lines in the upper left corners and scroll down). There will be lightning talks and break-out groups. Topics include the trail databases of NY and NJ. We look forward to receiving your input. Image credit: Alina Tarmu - Salt Marsh in Stony Brook, NY

  The Hudson Valley and NY/NJ chapters are happy to announce their first joint meeting, taking place Wednesday, January 26, at 3 PM EST, on Zoom. The meeting is hosted by the Hudson Valley Chapter, whose organizers approached us a few weeks ago with this initiative, much to our joy. Both our chapters’ organizing committees members have been discussing lately a few online as well as in-person activity ideas in which our members would be interested this year, and the agenda looks exciting. Email us for details if interested in attending.

We are planning an in-person networking event at our former meeting place, Bedford Falls. This event is registered on gisday.com, so we will be giving away five free ESRI licenses for personal use. The rules for the raffle are mentioned in the Meetup event. We greatly enjoyed our October hike in Brooklyn Botanic Garden  and we planned more ambitious hikes for next year. We are also considering transferring our event announcements to Eventbrite . This event is a chance for new potential members of our chapters to get to know us better and forge new collaborations in the field of conservation GIS. Please note that you will need to RSVP on Meetup one week ahead for reserved seating, there is a ten person maximum, and proof of vaccination is required.

 After an extended winter holiday that almost everyone we know seemed to have taken, we decided to move our meeting day to the fourth Tuesday of the month , keeping the time that seemed to be convenient for most people. We started the year with an Intro to QGIS workshop held by our member Ryan Lennon . In February, we had the joy and privilege of hosting Derek Masaki 's presentation of USGS' s latest dynamic topographic mapping platform that is scheduled to be launched in the fall. At the end of the meeting, some of us stayed on Zoom for a debrief that developed into bragging about our latest specialty reads - turned out that we had quite a collection of exciting map-related books to tell each other about! We have been toying for a few months with the idea of having our own book club, and organizing a book show-and-tell seemed like a good start. So there it is ! We have ten slots of five minutes available. Three or four of us organizers will hop in with our finds in case there

We are getting together on Zoom , in mid-December, for a final 2020 Meetup - an informal online event to wrap up an extraordinary year that has forced us (and most everyone else) to retreat into virtual realms. If the future of GIS is in the cloud and the future of commute is the telecommute, these surreal times seem to have vastly accelerated the trend and, hopefully, weakened our resistance to change. It's something on which we would be wise to work constantly since the world seems to change increasingly faster. With the worrisome positive feedback loops of climate change, perhaps Moore's law extends beyond computers. We can discuss similar topics and others, preferably less heady and more cheerful, during our online meeting. We have made new friends, started new jobs, new projects, despite or due to what's going on. Because we have an amazing community . Let's celebrate it! P.S. Last year I made  these whimsical dymaxion holiday ornaments ... Why not try your hand at