As summer winds down and fall ramps up (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), so too does the GeoSAR event calendar. Participating in conferences and workshops across the globe, our client program managers (CPMs) have been globetrotting more than normal lately. But any stress felt by long lines and limited leg space is well tempered by a love for travel. As Roy Hill, a veteran CPM explains it, “It’s only after you’ve actually been to a place—seen its topography and experienced its culture—that you can begin to envision all the potential ways geospatial data can be employed.” Indeed, mapping isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution anymore.

This notion played out last month at the Map Asia conference held in Singapore. There, Roy presented a paper entitled, “Advanced Feature Extraction and Classification Using GeoSAR P-band and X-band DBInSAR”. It’s a new technique with a long list of potential applications, including, resource mapping, intelligence mapping, and biomass estimation. For a government considering new country-level topographic mapping, this capability far out-values the off-the-shelf, points-and-pixels approach to geo-knowledge development.

In fact, it was the biomass potential that made a big impact in the room that day. A gentleman, whose company consults on REDD-based programs, was intrigued to learn of a remote sensing approach to carbon accounting that could overcome the barriers of weather and dense foliage. But it’s not just the single solution that is exciting; it’s the ability to exploit a foundational dataset to develop new revenue streams and answer critical emerging issues. The science has come so far…why not make the most of it?