History
The first ForestSAT conference, (held in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2002), was developed from the need to establish a bridge between the scientific community and the large group of foresters hungry for operational applications of earth observations and spatial analysis techniques. Since then, a ForestSAT conference has been hosted every two to three years. While no formal organization existed at first, an informal group of colleagues and conference hosts carried the ForestSAT torch from year to year as the conferences grew in both size and scope, embraced and explored new technologies, and broadened its audience.
In 2014, it became apparent that the growing ForestSAT community would be better served if a formal structure was adopted. Creating a formal organization would help insure continuity, maintain the high quality for which the biennial conference was known, and allow us to develop new means by which to serve the ForestSAT community at large. To that end, the formal organization of ForestSAT (Association for Forest Spatial Analysis Technologies) was developed in 2015, with an organizational constitution officially adopted that December.
To date, nine international-level ForestSAT conferences have been held on three different continents, with the number of attendees growing steadily with each conference. While the first conferences drew mainly a European audience, the ForestSAT, held in 2018 in College Park, Maryland, USA, drew almost 500 participants from 45 countries. The ninth conference was planned to be hosted in Krakow, Poland in the autumn of 2020 but had to be postponed due to the corona virus pandemic. The ninth ForestSAT conference was held in BerIin, Germany, August 29th–September 3rd, 2022. The next ForestSAT conference will be held in Rotorua, New Zealand in 2024.