First Esri Climate Resilience App Challenge: Who’ll Start the Reign?

Esri Climate Challenge image (used with permission)

The 34th annual Esri users conference begins today at the San Diego Convention Center, drawing geography techies from more than 90 countries to share their ideas and insights in the use of Redlands, CA-based Esri’s mapping software. Last year, more than 13,500 people attended the five-day conference, which offers a wide range of sessions on mapping and geospatial information system (GIS) technology.

Privately held Esri, founded in 1969 as the Environmental Systems Research Institute, was a pioneer in GIS technology and continues to expand the capabilities of its ArcGIS mapping software, by adding such features as location analytics for business customers.

Esri president Jack Dangermond will kick things off with his usual overview of the Esri ecosystem. This year, keynote presentations by Dr. Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization and Dr. Vincent Seaman from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will show how public health workers are mapping software in a global initiative to eradicate polio.

Dangermond also is scheduled to name the top three winners of the Esri Climate Resilience App Challenge, which the company announced in March as a way to support a White House Climate Data Initiative, according to Chris Thomas, Esri’s director of government markets.

“We asked government agencies and NGOs [non-governmental organizations] what they were struggling with, and what they need to accomplish” in terms of climate change, Thomas said. “We went to hackathons, software development communities, and conducted a worldwide search of what was out there.

“What we saw was more of a dialog of what people saw as their particular challenges to climate change,” Thomas said. “For people who live on the coast, their priority is coastal flooding. For people in Littleton, Colorado, they’re more worried about the ‘silver tsunami,’” which is the wave of older people who live in the community without air conditioning. During a prolonged heat wave, they need someplace to go.

Esri received about 50 submissions before the June 2 deadline that met contest criteria, and will provide three winners with over $15,000 in cash prizes or software equipment. The company named 13 finalists earlier this month, and they are:

—Modeling Community Erosion from Climate Change, submitted by Stone Environmental, a consulting firm in Montpelier, VT, enables users to identify areas that are vulnerable to

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.