July 11-13, 2016
Sacramento, CA

It is fitting that the 2016 AWRA Summer Specialty Conference, GIS and Water Resources IX, will convene in Sacramento, the capital of the USA's most populous state - California, also a global economic and agricultural powerhouse. Water drives California's economy and way of life but in recent years its most precious resource has been in short supply. The state pauses at the proverbial crossroads, anxiously eyeing a likely future with less precipitation, continued groundwater pumping, lower environmental flows, agricultural uncertainty and a host of other issues requiring decisions that will shape the state's political, social, cultural, economic, and physical landscape for many decades. Can GIS provide help? That's one reason why we are meeting here.

Yes, decisions, decision, decisions - the Golden State faces a boatload of them, but so do many other states, municipalities, countries, industries, and regions. Management of water and related resources requires many decisions, both long term for planning and short term for operations management. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a technology has been used in the water resources domain since its inception. Traditionally, GIS was focused on data management and processing to streamline development of information products based on spatial data, and was thus a natural fit for water resources implementations. As technology, data availability, and its utilization have matured, GIS is more and more used not only for data acquisition and processing, but also for implementation of decision support systems. The "information" products are now becoming "decision" products that are used on daily basis to support water and land management decisions in many domains that water resources covers. Broad utilization of Internet, wireless, and cell technology in both professional and everyday use enables quick dissemination of decisions and their conversion into actionable items.

The 2016 Summer Specialty Conference on GIS and Water Resources IX will focus on the role of GIS to support better decisions across a broad spectrum of water, land, ecological, and related resources. Decisions related to floods, droughts, water quality, groundwater withdrawals, environmental impacts, and policy aspects of water and related resources will all be covered. The latest GIS techniques and technology will be presented in the context of full implementation cycle, from data collection, process modeling, decision making, information dissemination, and action support.