Synopsis of the 18th UF/FL-ASPRS Lidar/Geospatial Workshop

The Florida Region of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (FL-ASPRS) and the University of Florida (UF) Geomatics Division held the Spring Lidar/Geospatial Workshop on 8 May 2025. The workshops continue to meet, in-person and virtually, at the Mid-Florida Research & Education Center of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and over Zoom. They are open, free of charge, to all interested persons. The Spring 2025 Workshop hosted 75 on-site participants and 65 virtual attendees from multiple US States (California, Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Texas, and others) and even participants from Portugal. The UF/FL-ASPRS workshops serve as both a bi-annual FL-ASPRS Region meeting and as educational outreach to the general photogrammetry and remote sensing community. With respect to the ASPRS mission statement, “to promote a balanced representation of the interests of government, academia and private enterprise”, the program focuses on these three sectors with presentation sessions devoted to each.

State and federal agency updates

The workshop started with 10-minute briefings from several state agencies focused on Florida-based projects. The St. Johns River Water Management District (Ed Carter) discussed on-going work to incorporate bathymetric data collected over 20-years with newer, high-density topographic lidar data, and the Southwest Florida Water Management Districts (Nicole Hewitt) presented updates on recent lidar data acquisitions. As the topobathymetric lidar portion of the Florida Seafloor Mapping Initiative (FSMI) ends this summer, project managers from each of the acquisition firms, Woolpert (Rick Householder), Dewberry (Emily Klipp) and Fugro (Heather Heyer) each reported that their firms were rapidly approaching 100% topobathymetric lidar acquisition. They also reported that their sensors, Leica Geosystems (Hawkeye), Teledyne Geospatial (CZMIL SuperNova) and Fugro (RAMMS), were all performing better than anticipated and were mapping to the 30-meter isobath before laser extinction.

The USGS and NOAA presenters were unable to attend in person, so Jo (Josefa) Baker, the recently appointed USGS-Florida Liaison, discussed the new USGS Lidar Viewer and provided a demonstration of the system via a pre-recorded contribution. Similarly, Matt Pendleton (NOAA) joined virtually and presented the latest update on the NOAA high-resolution Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP).

Keynote speaker

Denis Riordan (NOAA/National Geodetic Survey), the NOAA/NGS-Florida Liaison, provided the keynote presentation, discussing how to prepare for the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS) Modernization. Denis demonstrated some of the tools and products (NOS NGS 92, M-PAGES, OPUS, VDATUM, and others) to assist users in converting their existing data into the updated NSRS. He also presented the new State Plane Coordinate systems (East, Central and West) for Florida along with the Florida Peninsula Zone, and the preliminary SPCS 2022 statewide oblique coordinate system.

Academic presentations

Five students from five universities with ASPRS Student Chapters gave oral presentations of their work to the Workshop. Diana Phillips (Nova Southeast) discussed her research on marine fish conservation; Marianna Coppola (Florida International University) presented a portion of her Ph.D. dissertation on seagrasses’ response to water quality; Nithish Manikkavasa (Florida Atlantic University) shared some of his master’s research on geomatic approaches to coastal management; Alec Colarusso (University of South Florida – St. Petersburg) used artificial intelligence to help predict flooding; and Keenan Hubbard (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University) showed how he used synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to measure lakes in the Middle St. Johns River Water Management District. Dewberry gifted first time presenters, Marianna Coppola, Alec Colarusso, and Keenan Hubbard, with complimentary copies of the DEM Users Manual, 3^rd Edition¹.

New to the workshops, student posters were accepted as a presentation format. We were very happy to accept four posters for this first session. Sam Yaw Appiah (University of South Florida – St. Petersburg) – “delineating optimal solar sites in Atlanta using GIS and remote sensing”; Chris Atta Amponsah (University of South Florida – St. Petersburg) – “The evolution of GIS-integrated machine learning for flood prediction and comparison of CNN and HEC-RAS flood modeling”; Samanatha Velasco (Bethune-Cookman University) – “Tracking coastal inundation and beachface dynamics at public beaches using high-resolution surveillance camera images in Volusia County, FL”; and Jake Andrews (University of South Florida – St. Petersburg) – “The creation of a public-domain webtool for determining flood depth using convoluted neural network via community-sourced photos”.

To encourage student posters, the workshop organizers are promoting a Student Poster Competition for the Fall 2025 meeting.

Sponsor participants

The Spring Workshop welcomed continuing Gold-Level Sponsors (in alphabetic order): Dewberry, Fugro, GPI Geospatial, Langan, RIEGL, SurvTech, and Woolpert. Dewberry, GPI Geospatial, RIEGL and Woolpert have helped sponsor all previous workshops. For the Spring Workshop, we welcomed back four returning Silver-Level Sponsors: Duncan Parnell, Kucera International, McKim & Creed, and SAM Engineering. Kinetics Geo, a frequent Bronze-Level Sponsor ,returned to the Workshop, and True North, a new Bronze-Level Sponsor, was introduced.

Save the date

The UF/FL-ASPRS Fall 2025 Geospatial Workshop is scheduled for Thursday, 6 November 2025, in-person at the UF/IFAS Mid-Florida Research and Education Center and virtually over Zoom. Check the ASPRS Newsletter for registration information.

¹ Maune, D.F. and A. Nayegandhi (eds.), 2018. Digital Elevation Model Technologies and Applications: The DEM Users Manual, 3^rd Edition, ASPRS, Bethesda, Maryland, 652 pp.