IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - June 2021 - 5

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
BY DAVID KUNKEE
GRSS: Continued Growth in Difficult Times
I
n this issue's " President's Message " column, I want
to first convey how the IEEE Geoscience and Remote
Sensing Society (GRSS) is continuing to respond to the
enduring COVID-19 pandemic by defining our future
conferences and growing our outreach while continuing
a strong membership trend in 2021. We are in an
unprecedented time, initially driven by the impact of
COVID-19, and now we are also motivated by the newly
gained accessibility and the extended reach of virtual
and hybrid meeting formats. Second, I want to discuss
how we are evolving and modernizing the Society with a
goal of providing better membership value overall. Some
examples you may have seen and are perhaps already
experiencing are our focus on webinars and our social
media outreach as well as our recent website upgrade.
The changes that lie ahead include removing print options
for IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote
Sensing and IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters
in 2021. We will also roll out a record number of GRSS
initiatives in 2021, including a new student grand challenge,
increased standards activity, new industry career
skills workshops, and more regional-based initiatives,
to name a few. At the end of this column, I offer a
few words about our continuing collaborations and regional
activities, which are an important aspect of the
Society's continued growth and outreach.
Recently, I was particularly happy to report that,
through the continuing pandemic era, GRSS has retained
its membership over this past year, listing exactly 3,406
members in both February 2020 and February 2021.
Although this is a serendipitous result overall, we note
that our number of higher-grade members has increased
while those gains have been offset by a lower number of
student members at the beginning of 2021. We recognize
that younger members may have been impacted more
by the pandemic. We are continuing to focus on Young Professional
(YP) and student activities, with several new
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2021.3078249
Date of current version: 17 June 2021
JUNE 2021 IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE
initiatives in the making for 2021, including multiple
opportunities for Chapters and YPs to be involved with
nanosatellites through engagements in Spain, France,
and the Middle East and North Africa region.
Related to membership, I am excited to welcome two
new Chapters to GRSS! In January, the IEEE Beijing Section
GRSS Chapter Qingdao was formed and approved.
Then, in March, we welcomed the IEEE Indian Institute
of Space Science and Technology Student Branch Chapter
in the Kerala Section. These two new additions are
our 94th and 95th Chapters, respectively, of GRSS. As we
approach 100 Chapters (Chapters and student Chapters
combined), we want to better serve the needs of Chapters
on a regional basis, so we will be implementing a
Chapters Committee within the GRSS Administrative
Committee (AdCom). We hope that this will facilitate
coordination among our Chapters and lead to awareness
of IEEE and GRSS resources that Chapters can utilize
to enhance the value of IEEE and GRSS membership
for their own members.
In March, GRSS also held its first AdCom meeting
of 2021. Among the topics discussed was a summary
of GRSS initiatives now beginning to get underway for
2021. These activities include support for students working
with pocket satellite cubes, regional initiatives to support
conferences, support for standards activities, and
multiple geoscience and remote sensing summer schools
(GR4S), among others. The number of internally generated
initiatives by members of the GRSS leadership is the
most ever seen for GRSS, and with it comes perhaps the
best opportunities for continued growth in activities and
outreach. We are excited for all the initiatives in 2021 and
hope they will benefit the community to the greatest extent
possible. But, with this, we now may have to change
the name GR4S to GR3S schools because of not being
able to fit all of the planned offerings into just summer!
Specifically, we are planning three schools for 2021:
Drone Acquisition, Processing, and Applications, in
Belgium (7-9 July); Advanced Remote Sensing Techniques
for Risk Management, in Argentina at the end of
5
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - June 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - June 2021
