David Alvarez is currently the National GIS Division Director from the Great Lakes Region, and is a guest writer for the Florida Region.

The GIS Division has been focusing the last two years in increasing the presence and participation of the GIS field at the society events.  This is been done by setting at the annual conference special sessions focus on GIS or Integration of GIS/Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry and other activities.

For the year 2013 the GIS Division worked on:

• Preparing a special issue for PE&RS. Mobile Mapping for Disaster Management (October 2013).
• Update the ASPRS GIS Division website
• Partner with other Division on special session for the annual conferences
• Started the Online seminars series in partnership with CaGIS and GLIS.

Online Seminars

The online seminars began in January, 2013 and were planned approximately once a month excluding months when ASPRS conferences took place. The online seminars are 1 hour long (including Q&A) and ASPRS is responsible for the technical\communication setup. All of the seminars have been recorded and archived for anyone to view at a later time from the ASPRS GIS Division website.

The 2013 series has included 7 seminars to date (table 2), with 908 registrations and a total of 512 attendees (56% attendance rate). 63 attendees have attended two or more online seminars and there have been a total of 189 views of the archived seminars.

Conclusions

Based on the distribution of the zip code:

• Attendees are coming from all over the US and International. (See Maps)
• There are concentration of attendees in the Virginia-DC Area, Columbus, OH, Denver and surrounding areas, St Louis and San Francisco, CA.  – See map 1 and Map 2.
• International participation fluctuates more based on seminar topic, US participation is more consistent

• Get funding to increase the license to at least 500 attendees.
• Add the Organization of Fish and Wildlife Information Managers to the list of organization to participate on the 2014 series.