Organised by the Latin American Remote Sensing Symposium SELPER/Brazil Branch and the National Institute of Space Research (INPE), the event took place this year from 21st to 26th April at the Convention Centre in Florianópolis city, Santa Catarina State, Brazil. The number of participants, nearly 1,300 people of whom over three hundred undergraduates, 350 postgraduates and more than seven hundred professionals, demonstrates the event is one of the most import–ant remote-sensing symposiums in Latin America. There were 10% more participants this year than two years ago. A total of 256 papers were presented during oral sessions. There were also 696 poster papers, six special sessions, eleven workshops, twelve courses and seven roundtables.

Special Sessions
At one of the special sessions, representatives from key institutions such as the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA), MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd (MDA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency presented updates on their key programmes. The Remote Sensing Constellations framework under development by the Committee of Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) also featured in this session. We are now celebrating the tenth anniversary of implementation of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), and CEOS is the regional organisation in charge of implementing its remote-sensing tasks. Other special sessions were on “Commercial Remote Sensing Satellites”, “MAPSAR-the Radar of the Brazilian Space Programme Designed for Amazônia: Results of a Simulation and Feasibility Study”, and “Brazilian Remote Sensing Satellites for Earth Observation, Latin-America Co-operation in Remote Sensing”.

Workshops
A workshop on the last day discussed global warming and the potential and so far little known impacts of climatic change on Brazil. This workshop aspires to become a discussion forum on the impacts of global environmental change on several sectors and activities (Health, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Biogeochemical cycle) in Brazil. The results of the fourth IPCC Evaluation, freely publicly available since April 2007, were also presented and discussed. Traditionally, SBSR encourages the submission of papers for awards, and this year awards were made to the five best papers submitted in the category Scientific Initiation, to the six best papers presented in the Panel Session, and the five best involving the use of CBERS satellite data. In the last category, the best paper was from Rio Grande do Federal University.

Courses
One of the courses was on “High Spatial Resolution and Hyperspectral Sensors for Urban Applications" and co-ordinated by Cláudia Maria de Almeida (INPE) and Jorge Centeno (UFPR). The instructors were Prof. Martin Herold (Universität Jena, Germany) and Paolo Gamba (Universittá Pavia, Italy). This short course focused on the use of optical high-spatial-resolution sensors using knowledge-based approaches and object-oriented classification paradigms, hyperspectral remote sensing, and data fusion involving InSAR and Lidar data for 3D-modelling of the built environment.

Roundtable
The roundtable on “Best practices in teaching remote sensing at primary level in Latin America” was organised by SELPER Education Committee, UNESCO Space Program and CEOS Working of Education, Training and Capacity Building (CEOS-WGEdu). The aim was to present successful Brazilian experience concerning the use of remote sensing in classrooms at primary and secondary level. Three successful examples shown were, firstly, use of remote sensing and GIS in an urban school, secondly use of remote sensing and GPS in a very poor rural school, and thirdly a tutorial using GIS software, SPRING, to study river basins in geography classes.

See for proceedings, also of previous symposia: the website below.