At some point we professionals in the field must "take the bull by the
horns" to develop practical remote sensing techniques and train the land manager
to make them operational. Some of us will attempt to promote practical methods
at a meeting in Seattle, Washington May 22-28, 1983. The meeting will be
sponsored by the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation (RNRF) of America and
the American Society of Photogrammetry and entitled the "RNRF Symposium - The
Application of Remote Sensing to Resource Management." The symposium will
also be under the auspices of Working Groups 4 and ll, Commission VII of this
society, with the blessing and planned attendance of our President Louis Laidet.
.Presentations of the practical applications of remote sensing will be accom-
plished through tutorial and poster sessions. Dynamic speakers with a good
practical remote sensing application are now being sought for the tutorials
and a call for poster session presenters is being circulated at this time.
If any participants at this symposium have ideas for such a symposium, please
contact me.
But for now and in the immediate future I urge you to consider where we
are in the status and use of remote sensing for natural resources. At meetings
like this we communicate and inform fairly effectively with other scientists
and educators, but what have we done to promote the effective use of remote
sensing to get a job done? There is already a wealth of written material
available to us now. Pause and read the results of previous symposiums spon-
sored by this commission and its working groups; for example, the Toulouse
Conference of 1964 (UNESCO, 1968), the International Symposium on Remote
Sensing for Observation and Inventory of Earth Resources and the Endangered
Environment held in Freiburg, West Germany in 1978 (Hildebrandt and Boehnel,
1978), and the Symposium of Remote Sensing for Natural Resources held in
Moscow, Idaho in 1979 (Heller et al., 1980). Also read such comprehensive
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