GIS in Action 2026

Why does change feel so hard? Change is constant, and yet it’s one of the greatest challenges for individuals and organizations. Dr. Jessica Lorenz examines how the brain responds to uncertainty, why resistance is a biological reaction, and how we can build the capacity needed to move forward with clarity, care, and intention.

Informed by neuroscience, change management, and trauma informed care, this presentation provides practical, accessible strategies for building resilience. Attendees will learn how to strengthen personal capacity during times of transition and how to support others with greater empathy.

By connecting brain science with leadership practices, Dr. Jessica Lorenz offers an actionable path forward to navigate change more effectively, support well-being and build adaptive, thriving teams.

Dr. Jessica Lorenz brings over 18 years of experience helping individuals and teams strengthen organizational capacity through people-centered approaches. As a Change Manager and Workforce Development Analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, she collaborates across the agency to support change, deepen employee engagement and cultivate a values-aligned culture. She holds a Doctorate in Education with an emphasis in organizational leadership, grounding her work in research-based practices that drive sustainable organizational change.

The purpose of this collaboration session is to provide helpful guidance for anyone using ArcGIS Pro and Python together or separately. The basis for the material presented and demonstrated is everyday experience, particularly with respect to an annual project for which procedures have evolved over many years. A list of related and unrelated topics will be reviewed and audience members will be invited to contribute to the discussion. Ideally, there'll be something for everyone and, as usual, the goal is to provide a forum for a beneficial exchange of information, ideas, and inspiration.

Is your computer struggling under increasingly heavy operating systems? Have you heard of Linux, but aren't sure where to start? Worried about losing access to your programs? Join me for a brief introduction to the Linux ecosystem as a fellow new Linux user. I'll cover basic terminology, introduce distros and desktops, plus how I set up geospatial tools such as QGIS, Google Earth Pro, GDAL, and even ArcGIS Pro.

Last year, I closed this very conference by letting AI generate my slides dynamically. It crashed spectacularly. We laughed, I cried. Apparently, I haven't learned yet.
This year I'm back! But instead of fixing my approach, I've doubled down. I'll narrate, David Attenborough style, while Claude attempts to build a complete ArcGIS web application. I won't write a single line of code. At least, that's the plan, anyway.
AI scales effort, not judgment. With my hands off the keyboard, I'm freed up to make the real decisions: what to build, when to pivot, and whether the output is even good.
Will it work? Probably (not entirely). Things will break, and we will all learn something. That's the whole point.

Digital elevation models are primarily interacted with through a screen, but they can become powerful physical tools for visualization, teaching, and storytelling. This presentation explores the creation of tangible 3D printed topographic maps, transforming digital elevation data into physical models that make landscapes easier to interpret and engage with.

Building on a session presented at GIS in Action last year, this updated talk expands the workflow and lessons learned from additional experimentation and projects. We will walk through a practical pipeline for turning elevation data into printable terrain models, including sourcing DEM data, preparing and modifying terrain surfaces, exporting printable meshes, and producing final prints.

The workflow will demonstrate techniques using both ArcGIS Pro and QGIS, as well as web-based tools, to convert elevation rasters into printable geometry. The session will also introduce the fundamentals, including how printers operate, key components, and an overview of the current consumer printer landscape. Along the way we will discuss scale, vertical exaggeration, mesh resolution, printer limitations, and other design considerations that influence how terrain translates from raster data to physical form.

By the end of the session, attendees will understand the conceptual and technical steps required to move from DEM to printed object and will leave with practical knowledge for creating their own tactile terrain models.

We will explore how reliance on traditional blueprints and floorplans has repeatedly led to degraded and inefficient responses during critical incidents, as documented in after-action reports from national tragedies such as Uvalde, Parkland, and others. Using these real-world examples, we will illustrate the core problem facing public safety agencies: the lack of an accurate, accessible, and tactically useful common operating picture in moments where seconds matter. We will walk through the specific limitations of architectural plans during emergencies and introduce ways to provide first responders with a true common operating picture— a map designed not for construction, but for crisis. This session will move from problem to solution, highlighting technologies and strategies that are redefining how agencies prepare for and respond to incidents in schools and large infrastructure environments, and discuss how GIS fits into this picture.

As the GIS community transitions to Experience Builder, we have a unique opportunity to rethink how we present information to our users. Rather than relying on complex and static geoprocessing, one can use Esri’s Arcade language to transform data directly within the web map. This session explores how a county GIS department uses Arcade to deliver high-functioning tools while maintaining a lean, simple database.

We will walk through three levels of practical implementation, in increasing complexity. First, we will demonstrate basic data cleansing. We use Arcade scripts to standardize “messy” legacy data, such as fixing title casing and formatting soil classes for historical reporting. Second, we look at Arcade’s dynamic capabilities, with features such as buttons that dynamically generate URLs and text that displays feature attributes from multiple layers. Finally, we explore spatial relationships and calculations, making use of `FeatureSetByName` and `Intersects` to perform on-the-fly queries, and rudimentary sliver checks to catch topology errors.
Attendees will see how these techniques reduce the need for intermediate "clipped" layers and redundant data maintenance. We will conclude with a practical discussion on the trade-offs of this approach, specifically regarding client-side performance and the balance between browser-side logic and server-side preparation.

Oregon Metro's Safe Routes to School Walkshed Analysis application was created to provide information on transportation needs and barriers impacting K-12 students across the greater Portland region. This talk will highlight

Salps are gelatinous grazers that can rapidly form dense blooms in ocean ecosystems, yet the environmental conditions that drive where and when these blooms occur remain poorly understood. Understanding the spatial and temporal dynamics of salp blooms is increasingly important as ocean conditions shift and as blooms potentially influence commercially important fisheries. This study investigates the question: what environmental conditions allow salps to bloom and persist, and how might changes in their distribution affect market fisheries along the California Current System? To explore these questions, I mapped salp bloom occurrences along the California Current from 2013 to 2023 using observational data to identify patterns in bloom presence, magnitude, and geographic distribution. Spatial analysis revealed evidence of range expansion over the study period, with blooms appearing across a broader portion compared to earlier years. In addition, bloom magnitude increased during the middle of the decade, with particularly strong bloom events observed in 2017 and 2018. After these peak years, bloom intensity and frequency appeared to return to levels seen earlier in the decade. These patterns raise important questions about the oceanographic conditions, such as temperature shifts or altered circulation. This study provides insight into how changing ocean conditions may shape salp dynamics and, in turn, impact regional fisheries within the California Current ecosystem.

The Freshwater Trust (TFT) is a solutions-oriented nonprofit that uses precision analytics to quantify high-priority conservation projects that achieve watershed-scale outcomes. I will highlight the water resource tools we are currently applying to solve problems across the Western U.S. and show examples of decision-support applications and the geospatial workflows we use in arid regions such as Colorado. We are partnering with water managers, farmers, and conservation districts to design programs that build resilience through large-scale water delivery and on-farm irrigation modernization projects. The foundation for these programs is TFT’s BasinScout® Analytics: automated diagnostics that assess large landscapes and watersheds to estimate environmental benefits and prioritize feasible conservation actions at targeted sites. For irrigation-related programs, we aggregate public data sets to focus on conserving high-value farmland, improving water quality, and supporting agricultural economies and communities impacted by drought and decades of water speculation. TFT’s analytics and customized decision-support tools can help communities adapt to changing water conditions and direct funding to the most impactful actions that balance agricultural productivity and competing water demands.

This project develops a time-series InSAR workflow to monitor surface stability using Sentinel-1 SAR coherence data. By compiling multi-year interferometric pairs from a consistent acquisition geometry, the approach establishes a historical baseline of expected week-to-week coherence behavior across NW Oregon and SW Washington. New observations are compared against this baseline to identify statistically anomalous changes in surface conditions. The workflow combines cloud-based interferometric processing with local geospatial analysis, including automated extraction of coherence rasters and zonal statistics across vector or raster defined regions (administrative boundaries, FAR or land classification). The result is a scalable framework for detecting unusual landscape change, with potential applications in environmental monitoring, land management, and identifying unanticipated surface disturbances to both the natural and built environment.

As our devices become increasingly powerful, it is important to take full advantage of the hardware available. In April, Esri will release a brand new rendering architecture for the ArcGIS Native Maps SDKs to take advantage of modern rendering capabilities of the devices we use every day to bring improved performance and unlock new features. This will be available through the local scene, which enables 3D workflows in local projected data. In addition, the building scene layer will be added as a supported layer type for this release, allowing even deeper data access to 3D GIS data wherever users are.