Salt Lake City, Utah: Advanced geospatial technologies are providing new ways to understand environmental change, particularly in complex landscapes where conventional mapping approaches can be difficult to apply. At Geo Week 2027, a featured keynote titled “A Lake in Crisis: Mapping Utah’s Great Salt Lake” will examine how bathymetric LiDAR and integrated geospatial workflows are being used to map one of the United States’ most dynamic inland water environments. The event will take place February 23–25, 2027, at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City.
The keynote will focus on a large-scale project involving the Utah Geological Survey, Aero-Graphics, and Dewberry to map shallow lakebed, wetlands, and deeper-water environments across portions of the Great Salt Lake. The initiative combines green-wavelength bathymetric LiDAR, aerial data acquisition, multisensor mission planning, and advanced processing to improve upon legacy datasets and reveal lakebed features that have historically been difficult to capture.
The project illustrates the growing role of geospatial data in environmental monitoring and resource management. As water levels change, accurate information about lakebed morphology, wetlands, microbialite reef structures, and geological features can provide researchers and decision-makers with better information for understanding ecosystem conditions and planning future interventions.
Collecting this information presents significant technical challenges. The Great Salt Lake is characterized by shifting shorelines and varying water conditions, while turbidity and other environmental factors can affect bathymetric LiDAR performance. Addressing these conditions requires careful sensor selection, mission planning, data acquisition, processing, and validation.
The keynote will bring together Kelly Francis of Aero-Graphics as moderator with Bonnie Baxter of Westminster College, Josh Novac of Dewberry, and Michael Vanden Berg of the Utah Geological Survey. Their discussion will connect the scientific importance of the lake with the practical challenges involved in acquiring and interpreting geospatial information in a constantly changing environment.
The session also reflects a broader direction within the geospatial industry, where LiDAR, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, photogrammetry, GIS, and data integration are increasingly being combined to address complex environmental and infrastructure challenges. Geo Week's wider 2027 program includes sessions covering river and coastal mapping, topobathymetric LiDAR, remote sensing, digital twins, AI, and large-scale infrastructure applications.
Beyond the keynote, Geo Week will provide access to more than 225 exhibitors and technical sessions spanning geospatial and built-world technologies. The event brings together professionals working across infrastructure, natural resources, utilities, transportation, surveying, disaster response, energy, and other sectors where accurate spatial information supports operational and strategic decision-making.
The Great Salt Lake project demonstrates how advanced mapping can extend beyond visualization to become a foundation for scientific research, environmental management, and public decision-making. By combining multiple sensing technologies with sophisticated processing workflows, geospatial professionals can develop increasingly detailed representations of environments that are difficult to measure through conventional methods.
CIO Applications highlights technologies that enable organizations to transform complex data into actionable intelligence. Through coverage of Geo Week 2027, the publication examines how LiDAR, remote sensing, AI, and integrated geospatial technologies are helping organizations better understand environmental conditions and support data-driven decisions across industries.
