2025 Big Sky GeoCon - Mapping the Future: Innovations in Geospatial Technology

As Butte looks to the future, the community is working to build a new reputation as a hub for outdoor recreation. Through this work, the need was identified for an interactive online map that residents and visitors could use to locate outdoor recreation opportunities. Recreation opportunities are managed by many different entities and there was no centralized location to find maps and information. This presentation will share how the Basecamp Butte map was developed to address this challenge. The map will launch in Spring 2025 and provides a comprehensive view of outdoor recreation opportunities in the Butte area. 

State governments in the United States are increasingly mandating that educational institutions and municipalities adopt critical incident mapping (CIM) and emergency management planning to support first responders and computer-aided dispatch (CAD) during emergencies. This presentation underscores the value of integrating Esri products for CIM, emergency management and asset management, with a focus on indoor mapping and digital twins.

Key topic areas covered include data sharing, safety asset mapping, routing, 3D GIS, best path analysis, and evacuation planning, utilizing the latest reality capture methods and ArcGIS technologies. 

This presentation will provide an update on the MSDI Administrative Boundaries, Geo-Enabled Elections, and the U.S. Census Bureau Programs. The panelists will demonstrate their role in the election process and answer questions from the audience.

The panelists include:
• Meghan Burns, GIS Analyst / Administrative Boundary Theme Lead | Montana State Library
• Caroline Psaltis, GIS Specialist / Geo-Enabled Elections | Montana State Library
• Stuart Fuller, Elections & Voter Services Manager | Montana Secretary of State
• Dave Ritts, GIS Analyst | Census & Economic Information Center / Montana Department of Commerce
• Eric Spangenberg, GISP, GIS Coordinator | City of Helena / Lewis and Clark County
• Connor Fitzpatrick, Elections Division Supervisor | Lewis and Clark County 

Paris Gibson envisioned parks as essential to Great Falls’ urban identity. This presentation showcases how ESRI's Community Maps Editor has been leveraged to update city park layers in ESRI's Base maps, creating detailed and accurate information for both residents and visitors. Inspired by efforts to update the City Parks webpage, this project merges historical appreciation with GIS tools, ensuring that green spaces remain central to city planning. Attendees will explore the technical process of basemap editing, navigate the challenges of data integration and decision making, and discover how these updates honor Gibson's vision. 

Stormwater management is increasingly becoming a challenge for towns and cities that contend with population growth, aging stormwater infrastructure, and the increasing frequency and cost of storm events. Municipalities can leverage impervious surface mapping and analysis to help fund stormwater maintenance by providing an avenue to equitably assess stormwater utility fees based on the amount of impervious surface on a property contributing surface water runoff to a municipality's stormwater system.

In 2024, the City of Cheyenne, Wyoming, partnered with Pickett and Associates to advance its stormwater management program by conducting a GIS-based impervious surface mapping project. Pickett leveraged AI-based image classification using high-resolution aerial imagery to map impervious surfaces across 47.5 square miles and over 29,000 parcels within the City of Cheyenne. Pickett leveraged GIS tools, together with GIS data from the City and County, including Parcels, Address Points, Zoning, and Jurisdictional boundaries, to associate each parcel with a total impervious surface area and tie that impervious surface area to address points and, ultimately, utility billing accounts. Throughout this project, Pickett relied on web mapping applications to enhance communication and stakeholder engagement with the city engineers and city council members. This impervious surface analysis gave the city insight into each parcel’s surface water runoff potential based on its impervious surface area, which directly enabled Cheyenne to equitably assess a new stormwater utility fee based on parcel-level surface runoff potential. The city council passed the new stormwater ordinance in November 2024.

This presentation discusses the GIS-based approach and analysis that Pickett conducted for the City of Cheyenne, highlighting some of the challenges we faced and the impact that this analysis has made for the city’s stormwater program. The impervious surface mapping project not only supports Cheyenne’s Surface Water Management Program, but also provides actionable insights for future urban planning and stormwater mitigation, enabling the City to make informed, data-driven decisions to reduce flooding risks, improve water quality and better manage its stormwater infrastructure, ultimately benefiting the community’s sustainability and resilience. 

Since 2017, the MSDI Transportation Framework has been without dedicated staff to maintain it. However, the need for an accurate, up-to-date, and standardized statewide road centerline dataset has not gone away. Foremost, road centerlines with address ranges are a required dataset for NG9-1-1. Additionally, road centerlines are an important dataset for helping people locate themselves, navigate between places, and are a key reference layer in base maps. As a result, MSL staff have been working intermittently over the years to create a new Transportation Framework road centerline layer that meets NG9-1-1 standards, can be incorporated into base maps, and be efficiently and sustainably updated. Leveraging the work of local and tribal governments as they prepare road centerline data for NG9-1-1, MSL has released a new MSDI Transportation Framework road centerline dataset. Attendees will learn how this dataset is being maintained and how MSL plans to coordinate on-going maintenance and improvements. 

Montana is the fourth largest state by area with nearly half of its population living in rural areas. These residents often face challenges in accessing childcare services and a recent survey revealed that this drawback impacts their workforce participation.

Using data from public datasets and geostatistical techniques, we assessed the relationship between population density, land use, and authorized licensed childcare in Montana. This methodology identified areas with service deficiencies and provided a comprehensive understanding of the spatial distribution of these parameters. This finding is critical for optimizing the allocation of services and overcoming these childcare capacity deficiencies impacting rural populations. 

Effective geospatial governance is key to building a strong and sustainable GIS for your organization. In this session, we’ll explore how policies, tools, and web applications can be implemented to create a reliable GIS framework that promotes efficiency and reusability.

We’ll share the Montana State Library’s experience in developing a geospatial governance policy, including insights from our working policy documents, scripting tools, and dashboards. Attendees will gain practical knowledge on leveraging these resources to establish or enhance their own geospatial governance strategies. 

Effective asset management is essential for maintaining and optimizing parks and recreation infrastructure. This session will provide a comprehensive look at asset management from strategic planning to implementation and field operations.
The discussion will begin with a broad overview of asset management in parks and recreation, emphasizing its role in optimizing resources, improving service delivery, and ensuring long-term sustainability.

Next, the focus will shift to the implementation of an enterprise asset management system (Cartegraph) for Missoula Parks and Recreation. Lessons learned will be shared, including strategies for ensuring data accuracy, integrating GIS data, overcoming implementation challenges, and developing workflows tailored to the unique needs of parks and recreation assets. The presentation will highlight the transition to a data-driven approach to improve decision-making, streamline preventive maintenance, and enhance operational efficiency.

The session will conclude with insights from the field showcasing how asset management benefits daily park maintenance operations. Topics will include GIS integration for field staff, mobile application usability, asset digitization, and work management functionality. The discussion will highlight efforts to tailor the system for maintenance workers, ensuring efficiency and ease of use in managing park assets.

This session will provide valuable insights for organizations looking to implement or refine asset management practices in parks and recreation.

In 2019, Montana implemented a compensatory mitigation system for sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) habitat. Since then, Montana has experienced an increasingly complex landscape, posing unique challenges for the habitat mitigation system. The development of a geospatial model (Habitat Quantification Tool [HQT]) provides a non-biased, science-based, and stakeholder-supported process to quantify sage-grouse habitat. The HQT is used to establish a statewide baseline of existing habitat (i.e., HQT Basemap). Over time, impacts from newly implemented projects are used to update the HQT Basemap. By reviewing spatial changes in sage-grouse habitat over time, we can assess the efficacy of the sage-grouse mitigation system. 

Accurate, up-to-date, and standardized address point data have never been more important than right now for uses ranging from 9-1-1 and elections management, to broadband internet access, to package delivery. Working with local and tribal partners, MSL strives to make the MSDI Structures/Addresses Framework the source of address data in Montana for all these uses, and more. Come hear the latest updates on the MSDI Structures/Addresses Framework and how MSL is helping to improve address data quality and management across the state. 

The number of school districts in Carbon County has shrunk from 70 to 7 over the last 50 years. Years of abandonments, consolidations, annexations and transfers have significantly re-configured the boundaries of these commonly referenced districts. Is it important to track these changes? Considering that several other special improvement districts including fire, ambulance and cemetery districts referenced school district boundaries during their formation, the answer may be yes. This presentation describes the way in which GIS was used to track school district transactions over time and explores the challenges that were encountered while attempting to modernize school district boundaries. 

Montana is modernizing their stream and waterbody mapping data, which relies on the current National Hydrography Dataset (NHD). NHD is outdated and lacks detail for local features like canals and small drainages. With statewide lidar acquisition nearing completion, the next evolution of water course mapping will adopt the USGS 3D Hydrography Program (3DHP). 3DHP provides a new data model, more accurate and consistent data, and connections to water reporting systems. 3DHP will enable hydrographic analysis and visualization for a broad range of applications. Get involved to help improve Montana’s water data. 

This is a live demonstration utilizing the Montana State Reference Network (MTSRN) for the GPS correction solution in geotagging an imagery set from a large area UAV flight. I will be walking through the workflow from image acquisition through geotagging. A final image product will be presented; however, the image processing post geotagging will be done at a high level with low detail. 

Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) is coming quickly to Montana. The state’s selection of a NG9-1-1 Core Service Provider should align closely with this year’s MAGIP GeoCon annual conference. We hope to give any updates we have on implementation timelines and what will be required from local data suppliers. Even if we do not yet have a firm timeline, we are officially on the clock to be ready to support the GIS needs of a NG9-1-1 system soon. The Montana State Library (MSL) released its GIS Data Validation and Aggregation Portal for NG9-1-1 in October 2022. We will give an update on portal functionality and how local data suppliers’ uptake of the portal is going. In the coming year, we hope to get all local data suppliers using the portal. We will reserve some time for questions and suggestions for how we can better support local data suppliers. 

This presentation explores how drone technology and GeoAI revolutionize geospatial data workflows, from acquisition to actionable insights. High-resolution imagery collected by drones is processed into orthomosaics, 3D models, and other refined datasets. Advanced AI models analyze this data to identify patterns, detect anomalies, and inform decisions for applications like infrastructure monitoring. Emphasizing automated, scalable methods, this end-to-end process highlights efficiency, accuracy, and transformative potential, empowering organizations to address spatial challenges with precision. 

Local raster texture is an important attribute that can be used for sample design and raster-based classification, regression, and clustering. However, determining the appropriate kernel weights to quantify texture can be challenging and can vary depending on the remote sensing or computer vision task. We present an automated approach that uses principal component analysis (PCA) and convolution kernels to quantify orthogonal intensity and texture metrics. Our approach linearly projects raster data across covariance axes, learns kernel cell weights, and provides a straightforward mechanism to retain as much information as possible within the raster dataset while removing redundancy. 

As the term Digital Twin continues to grow in popularity, how do organizations understand what it means? In this presentation I will discuss that topic in more detail to help the group get a better understanding of the Digital Twin concept and how it can be leveraged to assist with organization’s modernization efforts.

From there, I will discuss the digital twin workflow from scan to BIM to GIS and then into an ALMS. Throughout we will present different data acquisition options, the conversion efforts, and wrap it up with some current use cases that are underway.





 

We will explore and discuss new advances in remote sensing technologies, and discuss their applications in government with an emphasis on emerging technology.

-Tasking and archived satellite imagery as high as 15cm resolution (previously capped at 50cm)
-Autonomous drone docking stations
-Oriented imagery and video
-Enterprise-scale imagery management (image services and STAC)
-Every scale reality mapping, including urban and environmental digital twins