News

Kari Craun, a Past President of CaGIS, has been selected as the first recipient of the Henry Gannett internal award to recognize outstanding contributions to the geospatial community by a USGS employee. Kari is Director of the USGS National Geospatial Technical Operations Center (NGTOC) and was selected for her extraordinary leadership and advancement of topographic services. More information about the award and Kari’s work as Director of NGTOC are available in the official USGS news release about the award

CaGIS is pleased to recognize the two winners of the ICA-IMIA map awards. The ICA/IMIA Award for Excellence in Cartography Award promotes and recognizes excellence in map design and advancement in cartography. The criteria for this award includes creativity, appropriate text, design balance, unity, clarity, effective use of color, cohesiveness of title and technical aspects of the subject matter. Two awards are given annually with no distinction between first and second place.

The first ICA/IMIA award went to the U.S. Geological Survey for Geologic Map of Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado (Cartographers: Paco VanSistine, Richard Madole, and Joseph Romig).

The second ICA/IMIA award went to Tokyo Map Research Incorporated for Relationship between geographical names and landforms with names of birds in Japan (Cartographer: Masataka Satoh). Congratulatons to both winners!

Congratulations to the three US applicants that were selected to receive ICA scholarships to attend ICC 2017. Jorge Chen from University of California – Santa Barbara (UCSB), Song Gao also from UCSB, and Amber Bosse from the University of Kentucky will each receive a 100 Euro award by the ICA to support their attendance at ICC 2017. Jorge will be presenting a paper titled “Rapid integration of indoor and outdoor coordinate reference systems using 3D point cloud data”. Song will be presenting “Identifying Geographic Features through Map Interpretation: A Case Study of Craters Using Controlling Variables”, and Amber will be presenting “For the Essentially Subjective Elements of Cartography, 1953-1995”. Be sure to see these if you attend the ICC!

The USNC was awarded $18,000 from the National Science Foundation to support the participation of early career scientists at the 2017 ICC. USNC member, Dr. Michael Leitner submitted the proposal to NSF and will administer it through his institution, Louisiana State University. With the additional $18,000 left over from the previous NSF travel grant (Rio de Janeiro), the USNC is able to fund all of the 32 early career scholars who applied for travel funding to attend ICC 2017. In addition, with contributions from CaGIS, Esri, and Intergraph, the USNC is also able to fund 19 non-early career scientists who will be attending ICC 2017. Congratulations to all 51 people who will be able to attend ICC 2017 with financial support from the USNC.