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Conference Proceedings
 2012 AWRA Spring Specialty Conference GIS & Water Resources VII
The 2012 AWRA Spring Specialty Conference GIS & Water Resources VII was held on March 26 to 28, 2012, in New Orleans, Louisiana. As with previous conferences in this series, the response to the call for abstracts brought the most exciting work being done in our field. Under the leadership of the Conference General Chair, John C. “Jack” Hampson, Atkins, North America, Inc., a not-to-be-missed event was organized. The special sessions concept was continued and expanded from the 2010 conference. The call to propose and organize special sessions produced 12 sessions, ranging from some familiar topics to new developments and panel discussions. Among these was a promising new development for our community: an Executive Session on Water Resources Information Technologies – Directions, Drivers and Opportunities organized by Katherine Lins, Chief, Office of Water Information, WRD, USGS. Additionally, the National Hydrography Dataset special sessions that were organized by Jeff Simley, USGS, were expanded into several additional NHD sessions based on abstracts received from the general call. This definitely turned into a banner year for the NHD! Of note was a new session focused on using geospatial decision support tools in the Atchafalaya Basin. Organized by Scott Wilson, Chief, Spatial Analysis Branch, USGS, National Wetlands Research Center, this session brings sharp focus to this important water resource. This year, the concurrent sessions were organized into conference topical tracks to better define the immense breadth of work presented and guide attendees. These tracks included the newly created Executive Track, Water Quality/Environmental, Flood Risk, Hydrologic Model Integration, Water Data Integration, The National Hydrography Dataset, LiDAR and Climate Change. It will be interesting to see what 2014 brings and how the field of Water Resources Geospatial Technology continues to develop! The conference and proceedings are the result of the hard work of a very large number of people. Beyond those already mentioned the following folks reviewed abstracts and papers and/or participated on the conference committee, without whom this program would have never been assembled: Dan Ames, Lori Armstrong, John Beebe, Stephen Bourne, Kelly Brumbelow, Ed Carter, Matt Cohen, Dean Djokic, Tod Daboldt, Joel Dudas, John Grounds, John Haines, Norm Jones, Steve Kopp, David Maidment, Venkatesh Merwade, Paco Olivera, Amit Shinha, Lawrence Spencer, Pete Steves, David Tarboton, Roland Viger, Shane Williams, Tim Whiteaker and Zichuan Ye. I also want to recognize the staff of AWRA for taking care of all the details and leading us in the right direction and for generally putting up with the occasional shenanigans and missed deadlines. What really makes this conference series so great, however, are the contributions via posters and oral presentations from our community. All of us on the conference organizing committee look forward to seeing what will be presented in 2014!
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