2022 Esri UC Top Takeaways

Our Esri UC Recap

Last week Blue Raster attended the largest GIS event of the year: the annual Esri User Conference in San Diego, CA. The event gathered almost 15,000 in-person attendees from around the world and over 16,000 digital attendees! Our team came back buzzing about new releases, captivating presentations, and all things ArcGIS. We’re excited to share our experience and what we learned at the 2022 Esri UC!

With ideas flying and new technologies being unveiled, here is what’s new and what our team is excited for:

New field applications are coming out! Our GIS Analyst Abigail Krump is interested in how Quick Capture is building out in complexity and expanding what users can do to provide accurate data. Additionally, new Survey123 capabilities are exciting as a user can now annotate images that are taken, speeding up workflows and adding a level of detail in data capture.
At the UC Plenary Session, the entire crowd erupted with excitement about ArcPro Catalog updates that enable you to see when an item was last modified.
New ArcGIS Dashboard updates including being able to download your source data got us excited and our clients are ready to implement the new changes!
Seeing the ArcGIS Online Imagery demo gave us many ideas for how some of our customers can create their own imagery analysis.
New Microsoft Power Automate updates about ready to use flows and the 25 new ESRI templates got the wheels spinning for our team.
Our GIS Analyst Andrew Patterson is excited for the new Field Map updates that enable complex computation utilizing Arcade within the app.
New data is being published to the Living Atlas to symbolize by feature rather than by the entire layer, enabling a user to produce effective and visually appealing maps.

We'd love to talk with you and share what we learned at this year's User Conference. Contact us today to set up a call!

GIS - Mapping Common Ground

This year’s event kicked off with a Plenary session hosted by Jack Dangermond, Founder and CEO of Esri. We heard from a range of inspiring leaders, including Deanne Criswell from FEMA and Ronan Donovan from National Geographic. The reoccurring theme of the plenary was GIS—Mapping Common Ground, using it as a tool for helping solve challenges in important arenas like climate research, conservation, disaster management, and more.

It was exciting seeing David Hayes's talk at the 2022 Esri UC about The National Climate Taskforce focus on climate and clean energy, with an emphasis on equity for disadvantaged communities. A prototype online portal built by Esri aims to provide a central hub of climate-related information for anyone to access. State and local governments can find policy maps, climate data, and links to funding sources to fight climate change.

More Plenary Highlights

The plenary showcased incredible work using ArcGIS Knowledge which enables users to visualize relational data in and outside of space using graph science. Andrew believes there are a lot of opportunities to use this incredible technology with many of our projects.

Disaster response was another important highlight of the plenary, with Esri outlining all of the disaster response solutions and identifying their separate use cases. Our team got to sit down with the disaster response team to hear a summary of what is new and what’s on the horizon with the disaster response program. We learned there is a new national and global level disaster response hub with curated data sets for disaster response deployment.

Our work with the Jane Goodall Institute was showcased on the main screen! Blue Raster GIS Analyst Abigail Krump felt that her experience at the UC and plenary brought a lot of context to the purpose of the project as a whole. Abigail came home from San Diego with some serious ideas for how to continue improving the project.

“Seeing it in the context of the community and on the ground work was really refreshing. Alice Macharia, head of African programs of JGI, thanked me for my work which was an incredible honor.”

Abigail was honored and excited to have the opportunity to meet the Jane Goodall Team that she works with remotely. For her, it has been a lifelong dream to work with JGI. Abigail was impressed by how JGI presented a strong understanding of where conservation science in GIS is moving towards to better serve the communities they are working with.

2022 Esri UC Highlights

Sustainable World Spotlight

The Sustainable World Showcase is a hub for GIS users working to make strides to support the planet, people, prosperity, and peace. GIS applications under the Sustainable World umbrella included climate change, conservation, disaster response, education, global development, humanitarian, nonprofit, racial equity, and social justice. Blue Raster also sponsored the Sustainable World Community Social on Tuesday night.

On Tuesday, Eric Ashcroft, Senior Project Manager, presented a lightning talk at the Sustainable World Spotlight Theater: Nonprofit Takeover to discuss Blue Raster Celebrating 20 Years of Supporting Non-Profits. Blue Raster gave a spotlight to three of our projects: Jane Goodall Institute Tacare Program, World Resource Institute L.E.A.R.N. Tool, and Stimson Mekong Dam Monitor.

ArcGIS Velocity Session

Our Manassas Park project was featured during the ArcGIS Velocity session. Suzanne Foss, Product Manager at Esri spoke with us one on one about our project which she featured in her presentation on Thursday. She highlighted how Blue Raster is using ArcGIS Velocity in our work. Andrew says it was rewarding to get the reassurance that our team’s work was functional and serving a good purpose, as well as that we are on the right path to develop it further as Velocity develops. This session also demonstrated the capabilities of ArcGIS Velocity and Real Time that we are eager to explore and implement in our work, whether it is for real time data or something like social media data scraping.

Elections Special Interest Group

Michael Lippmann presented our work with the Georgia Secretary of State, Election Division on the development of the Redistricting Quality Assurance Tool that enabled Georgia to validate and confirm voting district assignments in 159 counties. In addition, we learned more about what tools are available to deploy through ArcGIS Elections Solutions for the upcoming elections.

Map Gallery

Blue Raster also had the opportunity to showcase four posters designed by our team members in the Map Gallery. We highlighted our work with The Henry Ford, Virginia Department of Transportation, New York Botanical Gardens, and The Stimson Center. We were thrilled to have to opportunity to meet with Jarell Brown from the Henry Ford and Regan Kwan from the Stimson Center at the gallery.

Mary Bracho, GIS analyst, says it was awesome to be recognized by our clients at the Map Expo, and it was interesting to visit client’s presentations. It was Mary’s first Esri UC experience.

“It was very exciting and amazing to be in a room of 15,000 GIS users, it’s not every day that you encounter this environment.”

Mary also visited several demo theater sessions. As Blue Raster is getting into working more with Esri's ArcGIS Parcel Fabric, Mary had a meeting with the Esri Team and attended demo sessions. These sessions with the product team gave Mary lot of ideas and tools to implement in our own workflows. Mary also got the chance to meet with the ArcGIS Hub team and got to share some of the functionality GIS analysts would love to see from Hub.

It was incredible to see all our partners, peers, and clients, and it was rewarding for us to see how Blue Raster was welcomed and recognized by our peers and clients as well.

Thank you to all those that stopped by our booth, presentations, or our Fish Taco night. We hope to hear from you soon!