GIS Day at Colorado State University 2025
GIS Day: AI Applications in GIS
Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2025
Location: CSU Morgan Library (Room 173)
Lunch & Networking: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Presentations: 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM (30 min each including Q&A)
12:00 – 1:00 PM | Lunch & Networking
Join us for lunch and informal networking before the presentations begin.
1:00 – 1:30 PM | Morgan Garner — PlanIT Geoᵀᴹ
Rooted in Data: AI and Innovations in Canopy Assessments
Discover how AI and GIS are transforming urban forest assessments. Learn how machine-learning models classify trees and land cover to create high-resolution canopy data that supports urban planning and environmental studies.
1:30 – 2:00 PM | Katherine Moore Powell
AI & ML for Precipitation Classification
Mountain Rain and Snow (MRoS), combining citizen-submitted observations with remote-sensing data to improve models predicting rain, snow, or mixed precipitation in mountainous regions. Includes comparisons of neural networks, random forests, and XGBoost.
2:00 – 2:30 PM | Katherine Haynes — CIRA (CSU)
Utilizing AI to Aid Weather Forecasting
This talk explores two deep learning applications for improving weather prediction tools. The first uses AI to produce near real-time synthetic imagery to aid in tropical cyclone forecasting, and the second uses AI to improve vertical profiles of temperature and moisture for more accurately predicting deep convection.
2:30 – 3:00 PM | Sarah Gaulke — Fish, Wildlife & Conservation Biology (CSU)
Getting the Bands Back Together: 100 Years of Bat Banding Data
Using AI-based optical character recognition to digitize over 100,000 bat banding records, revealing new insights into bat movement, population dynamics, and conservation implications across North America.
3:00 – 3:30 PM | Kevin Worthington — Geospatial Centroid (CSU)
From Manual Entry to Machine Intelligence: Automating Surf Zone Fatality Tracking with LLMs
A Python + LLM workflow that automatically extracts surf-zone fatality information from news articles, produces GIS shapefiles, and publishes feature services to NOAA’s ArcGIS Online — reducing manual entry and improving consistency.
3:30 – 4:00 PM | Austin Stone & Terry Giles — Esri
GeoAI and AI Assistants within the Esri Ecosystem