Geo Week 2027 to Highlight Advanced LiDAR Mapping for Great Salt Lake Environmental Monitoring

Construction Tech Review | Wednesday, October 07, 2026

Geo Week 2027 to Highlight Advanced LiDAR Mapping for Great Salt Lake Environmental MonitoringSalt Lake City, Utah: As environmental conditions evolve, accurate spatial data is becoming increasingly important for understanding landscapes, managing natural resources, and supporting infrastructure and environmental decisions. Geo Week 2027 will feature a keynote focused on “A Lake in Crisis: Mapping Utah’s Great Salt Lake,” highlighting how advanced bathymetric LiDAR and integrated geospatial workflows are being applied to map one of the region’s most challenging environments. 

Scheduled for February 23–25, 2027, at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, the event will bring together professionals working across geospatial technology, surveying, mapping, infrastructure, and the built environment. The Great Salt Lake keynote will examine collaborative work involving the Utah Geological Survey, Aero-Graphics, and Dewberry to map shallow lakebed areas, wetlands, and deeper-water environments.

The project combines Utah-based aerial data acquisition, green-wavelength bathymetric LiDAR, multisensor mission planning, and advanced processing. 

The approach is intended to improve upon legacy datasets and provide greater detail about lakebed features that can be difficult to capture in a dynamic inland water environment. 

The lake presents a demanding mapping environment because water conditions, shoreline positions, and lake morphology can change over time. Murky water can also affect the ability of LiDAR systems to capture submerged features consistently. These conditions make sensor selection, flight planning, acquisition timing, processing, and data integration important elements of the overall workflow. 

The keynote will explore what the new geospatial information can reveal about microbialite reef structures, lakebed morphology, wetlands, and geological features. It will also examine how detailed information about the physical environment can support scientific research, environmental management, and public decision-making.

Kelly Francis, Co-President of Aero-Graphics, will moderate the panel, with Bonnie Baxter of Westminster College, Josh Novac of Dewberry, and Michael Vanden Berg of the Utah Geological Survey contributing their perspectives. The discussion will connect the technical requirements of large-scale mapping with the environmental implications of changing conditions around the lake.

The project represents a broader evolution in geospatial technology, where LiDAR, remote sensing, photogrammetry, GIS, and advanced processing are increasingly combined to solve complex mapping problems.

Geo Week's broader program includes work involving topobathymetric LiDAR, remote sensing, AI and machine learning, digital twins, point-cloud processing, and integrated land-water mapping workflows. 

These capabilities have applications well beyond environmental monitoring. Similar geospatial workflows can support infrastructure planning, flood assessment, water-resource management, natural-resource operations, coastal and river mapping, and asset inspection. The ability to integrate spatial datasets while documenting uncertainty and changing environmental conditions is becoming increasingly important for organizations managing complex physical environments.

Geo Week 2027 will provide a wider platform for examining how geospatial professionals are applying emerging technologies to real-world challenges. The event combines technical education, case studies, networking, and access to technologies spanning the geospatial and built-world sectors. 

Construction Tech Review highlights technologies transforming construction, infrastructure, surveying, and the built environment. Through coverage of Geo Week 2027, the publication continues to examine how LiDAR, remote sensing, spatial data, and intelligent geospatial workflows are supporting more informed decisions across complex infrastructure and environmental projects.

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