October 6, 2026
Geo Week has announced its first keynote for 2027, focusing on an ambitious geospatial project using bathymetric lidar to map Utah’s Great Salt Lake and provide new insight into its changing lakebed, wetlands and deeper-water environments.
The keynote, “A Lake in Crisis: Mapping Utah’s Great Salt Lake,” will take place during Geo Week, February 23–25, 2027, at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The presentation and panel discussion will examine how advanced geospatial technology is being used to collect detailed information about one of the western United States’ most threatened lakes.
As the Great Salt Lake shrinks and water levels change, researchers and decision-makers need increasingly detailed information about the physical landscape beneath the water.
The project brings together the Utah Geological Survey, Aero-Graphics and Dewberry, combining aerial data acquisition, green-wavelength bathymetric lidar, multi-sensor planning and advanced data processing.
The goal is to improve upon legacy datasets and reveal lakebed features that have historically been difficult to observe.
Unlike conventional topographic lidar, bathymetric lidar uses wavelengths capable of penetrating water, allowing researchers to collect elevation information about underwater environments where conditions permit.
For the Great Salt Lake project, data collection presents significant challenges because of murky water, changing shorelines and the lake’s continuously evolving shape.
Michael Vanden Berg, Energy & Minerals Program Manager with the Utah Geological Survey, said that while collecting the information is difficult, areas where data can be captured are providing unprecedented detail about the lakebed.
Changes to the Great Salt Lake have implications extending far beyond Utah.
Its wetlands support migratory species across the Americas, while the lake also has connections to the global aquaculture industry. As water recedes, exposed portions of the lakebed can also create concerns about potentially harmful dust affecting nearby population centres.
Understanding the lakebed’s physical characteristics can therefore support scientific research, environmental management and public decision-making.
The new geospatial data is providing information about microbialite reef structures, lakebed morphology, wetlands and geological features. Researchers are also identifying areas where additional investigation may be required.
The Geo Week keynote will explore the technical challenges involved in collecting high-quality data across such a dynamic environment.
Project teams must coordinate multiple sensors, plan aerial acquisition around changing environmental conditions and process large amounts of raw geospatial information into usable datasets.
According to Geo Week, the project demonstrates how geospatial professionals can combine technologies and expertise to address complex real-world problems at scale.
While the Great Salt Lake provides the immediate use case, the data acquisition and processing techniques discussed during the keynote could have applications beyond the lake itself, particularly for environmental monitoring, surveying, mapping and infrastructure planning.
The keynote panel will bring together experts involved in geospatial mapping and Great Salt Lake research.
Kelly Francis, Co-President of Aero-Graphics, will moderate the discussion. Panelists will include Bonnie Baxter, Director of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College; Josh Novac, Associate Vice President and Program Manager at Dewberry; and Michael Vanden Berg of the Utah Geological Survey.
The session will examine who and what may be affected by the lake’s decline, why better lakebed information is needed and what researchers are learning from the newly collected data.
Geo Week 2027 will take place February 23–25 at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City.
The Great Salt Lake presentation is the first keynote announced for the 2027 conference, with the full program expected to be released at a later date.
By bringing together lidar, aerial acquisition, advanced processing and environmental research, the project provides a large-scale example of how geospatial data can help researchers and communities better understand rapidly changing physical environments.
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