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Last week, the CGIAR Consortium for Spatial Information (CGIAR-CSI) took part in the international GIS conference (ESRI user conference 2012) in San Diego California. Participants from IFPRI and CIAT served information about ongoing research of geospatial scientists within the Consultative Group for International Agriculture Research  (CGIAR) to visitors of the booth located in the Environmental Showcase section. Further the scientists presented their ongoing work in the conference session Spatially-Explicit Modeling and Analysis for Agriculture Research and Development.

The Esri User Conference opened its plenary session by welcoming nearly 15,000 attendees who came from more than 130 countries. The theme of the conference was GIS – Opening Our World. One of the keynote speakers for the UC, Julia Marton-Lefèvre, director-general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), addressed the problem of species loss. She sees GIS as an important technology for locating species and preserving their habitats.

The conference highlighted technology advancements from mobile to the cloud and the releases of ArcGIS 10.1 and the new version of ArcGIS Online with better integration of online services into desktop GIS. User of ArcGIS can now easily publish and share their maps, contents and even geospatial services on the web.

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