The Year Ahead for the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing

When the XXIII ISPRS Congress ‘From human history to the future with spatial information’ ended about eight months ago, it marked the beginning of the new ISPRS period: 2016-2020. Since the end of the congress, 36 workshops and conferences, with ISPRS members as either the main organiser (ISPRS-sponsored events) or a co-organiser of the event (ISPRS-co-sponsored events), have been approved by the respective Technical Commission presidents and the secretary general, for 2017 alone!!! The amount of activity from our members is amazing and I would like to thank all organisers for their huge efforts in organising such meetings, which are the main engine for our society and our branches. An overview of all ISPRS events can be found at http://www.isprs.org/calendar/2017.aspx.

ISPRS also supports educational events – summer schools, of which three have been approved for 2017. The first one is in May, in Egypt (‘Technology and Summer School on Mobile Mapping’) and the second and third are taking place in July. Austria will host ‘Close Range Sensing Techniques in AlpineTerrain Venue’, and the ‘Summer School on 3D Surveying in Cultural Heritage’ will be held in Italy. All details can be found in the ISPRS calendar.

However, these are not the only scientific ISPRS events for the year. The major meeting of experts and friends of the society in 2017 will be the third ISPRS Geospatial Week (GSW2017), which will be held in Wuhan, China, from 18-22 September 2017. For more details, please visit http://gsw2017.3snews.net. The Geospatial Week is a joint meeting of mainly (but not exclusively) ISPRS workshops, taking place at the same time and in the same location to enable cross-discipline discussion and cooperation. The Geospatial Week is held in odd years between ISPRS Congresses. The organisers of GSW2017 in Wuhan are now very busy as the deadlines for submissions are drawing near. With these deadlines, the start of the following period begins – the reviewing process. Something ends and new things begin. This is (our) life. I hope you enjoy it.

Lena Halounóva, ISPRS secretary general 2016-2020