IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2021 - 6

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
BY DAVID KUNKEE
GRSS Accomplishments in 2021:
Success and Unexpected Turns
I
n this last message of the year, I think it is important
to summarize accomplishments of the Society in 2021
and describe our preparations for success in 2022. By the
numbers, our Society continues to grow. We added two
student branch Chapters in September with another one
expected in November. When this one receives its final
approval, the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society
(GRSS) community will total 70 Chapters, 28 student
branch Chapters, and 10 ambassadors engaged with
communities in locations where we hope GRSS Chapters
will form in the near future. This means that the GRSS
community now consists of 98 combined Chapters with
membership in the Society surpassing 5,300 members
and submissions to our journals surpassing expectations.
The numbers confirm continued success for GRSS in
2021, but this year also brought some unexpected twists
and turns with high expectations at the beginning to immediately
resume in-person meetings.
In the spring, GRSS completed transition of the website
to a new provider and updated its appearance and structure.
I hope that it offers more content and is more straightforward
to use when navigating the website. The process of
improving the website is ongoing, and we are continuing
to transition and add material. It is great to see this result
from many past planning sessions and discussions.
Extensive preparation by the 2021 IEEE International
Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS)
team to address numerous possible outcomes this summer
about the state of COVID-19 worldwide resulted in a decision
to pivot from the planned hybrid meeting format at
the beginning of the year to a fully virtual meeting. IGARSS
2021 again enjoyed record attendance and continued success
overall, including an in-person drone workshop and
an evolved meeting format. We are leveraging lessons
learned from the past two IGARSSs to provide the best
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2021.3129110
Date of current version: 14 January 2022
6
experience for the upcoming IGARSS 2022, which is currently
expected to have both online and in-person content
for those who can attend the meeting in Kuala Lumpur.
This past year, GRSS education and outreach activities
also expanded to include schools offered in all seasons,
not just summer, and we expanded GRSS course
offerings through the IEEE Learning Network. Don't
forget our cool videos, and now the second season's
sponsoring our " Down to Earth " podcast. Before the
end of the year, we also plan to reinstate in-person engagements
with our booth at the upcoming American
Geophysical Meeting in December.
Also underway is the third GRSS Student Grand
Challenge. This activity is a collaboration between the
Van Allen Foundation of the University of Montpellier
and IEEE GRSS. The combined activity consists of four
projects overall: REmote Sensing detection of Plastic
POllution in the Gulf of LIons, optiCal floAt for PlasTic
quAntIficatioN, Remote Identification of Microplastics
using Ocean Surface Anomalies, and Micro-PLAStic in
the SEA Detection experiment, with GRSS facilitating
the latter three projects. The project kickoff meetings,
with three of the four participants of this collaboration,
were held in October, with the fourth project kickoff
meeting anticipated for November. Tracking plastics
and debris in our oceans is an important topic requiring
a multidisciplinary approach. The value of a wide variety
of data, both remotely and in situ sensed, needs to be
assessed. New sensors may be needed to supply data to
better understand the problem, assessments for decision
makers, and design support to better control the problem
and its impacts. The four projects underway focus
on different approaches to the overall problem and possible
mitigations. It is exciting to see the enthusiasm and
value of these different approaches coming together.
In November, GRSS cosponsored the 2021 Asia Pacific
Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar, which was
held in Bali, Indonesia, thanks to conference organizers
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2021
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2021

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