Calendar 2025

International Contest on Remote Sensing Data Processing towards Tree-level Forest Understanding

01 Jul 2025 - 31 Jul 2026
Wuhan,China

Background of the Event

International Contest on Remote Sensing Data Processing towards Tree-level Forest Understanding is a series event, aiming to promote the development of innovative solutions for remote sensing data processing. This event covers different topics in different years, e.g., different types of processing (pre-processing, thematic information extraction, scene understanding, etc.), methodologies (marching learning and deep learning), and data sources (static, mobile, drone, etc.).

The 1st event of this series was initialized in 2014, where 18 teams from 10+ countries participated. The result was published as a research paper in ISPRS journal and has been listed as an ESI highly cited paper ever since it was published.

Liang, X., Hyyppä, J., Kaartinen, H., Lehtomäki, M., Pyörälä, J., Pfeifer, N., Holopainen, M., Brolly, G., Francesco, P., Hackenberg, J., Huang, H., Jo, H.-W., Katoh, M., Liu, L., Mokroš, M., Morel, J., Olofsson, K., Poveda-Lopez, J., Trochta, J., Wang, D., Wang, J., Xi, Z., Yang, B., Zheng, G., Kankare, V., Luoma, V., Yu, X., Chen, L., Vastaranta, M., Saarinen, N., Wang, Y., 2018. International benchmarking of terrestrial laser scanning approaches for forest inventories. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 144, 137–179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2018.06.021

The 2nd contest is under preparation supported by the ISPRS Scientific Initiative 2025 and co-organized by the WGIII/1 Remote Sensing Data Processing and Understanding led by the applicant. It is planned to start to call for participating in Jul. 2025. The final outcome of this contest is planned to be released at the end of 2025. Meanwhile, considering the complexity of organizing the international contest, the ending time may be postponed, but no later than Jul., 2026.

This year’s topic is the Individual Tree Delineation (ITD) in forests from point cloud data. The contest has built an international collaboration network, including top scientists and teams. At this moment, the contest has collected data, i.e., raw point cloud data and annotations of individual trees, from Brazil, Finland, Italy, and China, through the network. The network is increasing as the event progresses. More data and more tracks may be added during the progress of the event.

Artificial Intelligence for Earth Observation Symposium (AI4EO)

11-12 Sep 2025
Rennes,France

Themes of Event

• Advanced learning strategies, including un/semi/self-supervised learning, few-shot learning, and continual learning
• Novel geospatial foundation models and their evaluation
• Multi-modal data analysis, including textual data and large language models
• Physics-based machine and deep learning
• Data fusion techniques
• Analysis of complex data, including SAR, hyperspectral, or 3D point clouds data
• Super-resolution of satellite images
• Multi-temporal data analysis and change detection
• Semantic understanding, including classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection
• Big data and HPC
• Uncertainty quantification and explainable AI
• Applications in climate change, biodiversity, environmental monitoring, and disaster management or other EO-related topics
• New original benchmarks
• Embedded and frugal AI for Earth observation
• Cybersecurity challenges, including integrity and confidentiality

International Conference on Mapping the Future of Sustainable Landscapes:

Geospatial Innovations for People, Places, and Practices

postponed from June 2-3, 2025

08-09 Oct 2025
Awantipore,Kashmir

Themes of Event:

1. Geospatial Trends for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
   • Exploring AI, IoT, and Big Data for SDG-aligned solutions
   • Addressing global challenges through Innovative approach of spatial information science
   • Geospatial approaches for managing ecosystems in hilly, coastal, and plain areas
2. Geospatial Technology for disaster Mitigation
   • Geospatial technology for vulnerability assessment of various disasters
   • Geospatial data integration and DSS for multi-hazard risk mapping and Risk Reduction
   • Mapping of Environment Concerns – Global to Local ecosystems
3. Sustainable Tourism and Cultural Preservation
   • Enhancing tourism potential through spatial innovations
   • Mapping cultural heritage for sustainable tourism management
   • Infrastructure and Services Planning – a Geospatial Approach
4. Spatial Information Science Education & Industry-Academia Collaboration
   • Education and capacity-building in spatial information Science Education
   • Catch them Young – girl & women for STEM
   • Geospatial Industry-academia collaborations

ACRS 2025

The 46th Asian Conference on Remote Sensing

ISPRS/Asian Association on Remote Sensing (AARS) joint session on ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Geomatics’

27-31 Oct 2025
Makassar,Indonesia

Background of the Event

The 46th Asian Conference on Remote Sensing (ACRS 2025) will be held in Makassar, Indonesia on 27–31 October 2025.
This event is the largest annual event on remote sensing within Asia. More than 600 scientists, practitioners, and policymakers are expected to participate. This year’s event is organized by the Indonesian Society of Remote Sensing (ISRS/MAPIN) in collaboration with the Asian Association on Remote Sensing (AARS), under the theme of ‘Harnessing Remote Sensing for Global Sustainability, Resilience and Technology Innovation’.

Themes of Event

During ACRS 2025, we would like to have a special technical session on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Geomatics (UAVg), jointly organized by ISPRS and AARS. The special session aims to share the latest research and development related to UAV technologies and applications in the field of geomatics, remote sensing and photogrammetry and to exchange experiences and new ideas. High quality papers submitted to ACRS 2025 on these topics will be selected to form the special session. UAVs are being studied actively in Asia. This joint special session will introduce to Asian researchers the activities of ISPRS and the ICWG -II/Ia on autonomous sensing systems and their applications, as well as boost UAV related research in Asia.

NEXT GEO

Navigating Excellence in Geospatial Technology for Smart Cities

07-09 Nov 2025
Jaipur,India

Themes of Event:

1. AI & ML in Geospatial Applications
   • AI-Driven Spatial Analytics for Smart Cities
   • Geospatial AI, Digital Twins & 3D GIS for Urban Planning
   • Geospatial Applications – Tourism, Transportation Planning, Environment
2. Urban Planning & Sustainable Development
   • GIS-Based Land Use and Zoning Optimization
   • Open Geospatial Data for Policy Making
   • Geospatial Digital Infrastructure for Smart City Ecosystems
3. Emerging Technologies in Smart Cities
   • Blockchain & Geospatial Data Security
   • IoT-Enabled Smart City Solutions
   • UAVs & Remote Sensing for Smart City Management
4. Industry-Academia Collaboration for Smart Cities
   • Bridging the Gap: Geospatial Education & Industry Needs
   • Public-Private Partnerships in Geospatial Innovation
   • Skill Development & Capacity Building in Geospatial AI