Date: Friday, April 26, 2013 Time: 3-4:30 pm Place: UC Davis ARC Ballrooms Admission: FREE RSVP: Carrie Cloud DOWNLOAD THE EVENT FLYER Remember when you used to need 10 cents to make a phone call outside your home? The nostalgia of questions like this and others is no longer reserved for older generations. The advent of digital books and music, smart phones, and social media have opened our world to whole new professions, networks of communication, ease of access to media and information that were unheard of just 5 years ago. What technology will change our lives next? Jack Dangermond, president and founder of Esri, one of the world’s foremost geographic information system companies, is going to let us know. In an extraordinary talk—arranged in partnership with the College of Agriculture and Environmental Science’s (CAES) Agriculture Sustainability Institute (ASI) and Information Center for the Environment (ICE), and as part of the Arboretum and Public Garden’s commitment to inviting thought leaders to campus—the UC Davis community of students, faculty, researchers and staff are invited to take a guided tour of a new ecosystem of tools available to GIS (Geographic Information System) users Friday, April 26 from 3-4:30 pm in the Activities and Recreation Center (ARC) Ballroom. Dangermond’s talk titled, “GIS as a Platform: What it Means for GIS Users,” will inform the audience of recent and transformative changes to GIS technology. Not familiar with GIS? Think you are not a GIS user? Don’t allow yourself to be thrown off by a technical abbreviation. Once the domain of highly trained technical experts, GIS tools, as well as the once difficult to locate data necessary to explore interesting and important questions, are now available anytime, anywhere, and to anyone. If you’ve used a mapping program via the internet, used a smart phone to access location-aware content, or tracked a FedEx package…you are a GIS user. GIS is a tool that integrates hard data like a location or an address, with new ways to manipulate that data so it tells a story. Your story might be how you get from point A to point B, or, your story may be infinitely more complicated, like communicating the effects of climate change. If you’ve got a story to tell and you understand the power of location in telling that story, then this talk is for you. You will leave this engagement with ideas for communicating to your audience in ways you did not think were possible without a team of technical experts and data entry specialists, and that is just the beginning.

Visit to serve as launch of Esri-UC Davis pilot project

Dangermond’s UC Davis visit will also serve as the launch of a ground-breaking Esri-UC Davis pilot project. Dangermond’s passion for supporting conservation science combined with the Arboretum’s leadership and wide-reaching effort to bring GIS tools and education to public gardens, parks and zoos worldwide, has led to Esri selecting UC Davis and its Arboretum and Public Garden as the site to build a suite of cloud-based mobile GIS tools  to manage their organization and campus collections. The new tools that result from this work will be shared with botanical gardens and zoos around the world, to help them understand and protect the earth’s biodiversity as well as educate their 50 million visitors about critical issues in conservation science. “Over the past 10-years, the UC Davis Arboretum’s curatorial team has secured over $850,000 from a variety of federal grants and donations—not only to map and manage our own collections—this funding has enabled our team to become a leader worldwide for educating other public gardens about the advantages of adopting and integrating this technology into their work flows,” sites Kathleen Socolofsky, assistant vice chancellor of the UC Davis arboretum and public garden. “We are thrilled that this work has highlighted our operation and that our effort will lead to the development of a new suite tools designed to assist our campus to harness the power of GIS.” “With this commitment, Esri is not just supporting the development of tools for UC Davis and its Arboretum and Public Garden. Their goals are much larger,” Mary Burke, director of collections, UC Davis arboretum and public garden, “One of the world’s largest engineering and software development firms is now taking on the cause of public gardens. We are thrilled! The suite of tools that they develop here will be used to support the entire public garden community and one day, we hope, national park conservation efforts.” Dr. Steven Greco, associate professor of landscape architecture, has taught multiple graduate seminars on GIS and assisted in the Arboretum’s effort to secure their GIS-focused federal grants adds, “We’ve accomplished a great deal, but there’s so much more to be done. With UC Davis at the forefront of the development of this powerful suite of tools my hope is that urban planners and ecologists everywhere will be better-equipped to devise ways for natural systems and humans to co-exist equitably and prosperously.” A team from Esri is scheduled to begin this project in May. We will keep you updated on its progress and outcomes as the pilot is currently scheduled for completion this summer.