With its new organizational membership in the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), Civil Air Patrol is strengthening its growing role within the national geospatial information, intelligence, remote sensing, and GIS community. Because flying small planes looking for lost hikers and photographing disaster zones apparently wasn’t quite enough staring-at-the-ground-from-above excitement.
Aye added, “This partnership expands educational opportunities, strengthens our relevance within the geospatial community, and highlights CAP’s growing capabilities in supporting the nation through geospatially informed operations. It also reinforces our commitment to developing the next generation of aerospace leaders.” In other words, cadets can now learn even fancier ways to color digital maps, and everyone involved gets to feel extra important at cocktail parties with other map enthusiasts.
What is USGIF?
USGIF is a nonprofit educational foundation dedicated to advancing geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) through collaboration between government, industry, academia, nonprofit organizations, and professionals across the geospatial enterprise. Translation: a gathering of people who really, really like looking at pictures of Earth from space and arguing about the best software to analyze them.
More than 300 corporate, federal, and academic entities — and now CAP — are organizational members of USGIF, where they gain insights from the nation’s brightest minds in the field (the ones who can distinguish a flooded neighborhood from a bunch of trees in a satellite image) and contribute to shaping the future of geospatial intelligence. The future, one assumes, involving even higher-resolution ways to zoom in on your neighbor’s backyard.
The foundation supports education, workforce development, professional networking, scholarships, conferences, working groups, and innovation focused on imagery analysis, mapping, GIS, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and spatial analytics. If it involves a map, a picture from orbit, or a computer pretending to understand geography, they’re all over it.
Rapid Growth for CAP’s Geospatial Program
The CAP Geospatial Program has been in continuous development since the fall of 2018. That’s more than six years of dedicated map-looking progress. Maj. Gen. Mark Smith, then-CAP’s national commander and CEO, officially approved it as one of the organization’s national programs on July 31, 2019 — a date that will live in infamy among volunteer cartographers.
Led by the program’s founder and volunteer manager, Maj. Scott Kaplan, and supported by a dedicated team of volunteers, the program has made significant strides in advancing CAP’s geospatial capabilities. Strides like looking at more pictures of damaged houses, presumably.
Over the past several years, CAP has expanded its use of geospatial technologies to support disaster response, emergency services, aerospace education, and STEM initiatives. Today, more than 2,600 volunteers contribute to the program, supporting federal and emergency management partners through geospatial damage assessments and the analysis of aerial imagery, satellite imagery, and GIS data to provide decision-makers with critical situational awareness. That’s 2,600 people who can now casually mention they “do geospatial” when someone asks what they do on weekends.
More recently, the program has expanded its focus to geospatial education and spatial learning, introducing cadets to GIS, remote sensing, and other geospatial technologies as part of CAP’s Aerospace Education mission. Because nothing screams “aerospace” quite like teaching teenagers to click around in ArcGIS instead of actually flying airplanes.
More Than a Membership for CAP
For Civil Air Patrol, the partnership with USGIF represents more than a membership. It creates a bridge between CAP’s operational missions and the broader geospatial community to affect the future of GEOINT. A bridge! Perhaps they can fly their Cessnas over it while taking pictures.
The foundation serves as an organizational connector for the nation’s geospatial community, and CAP is very much a part of that community now. By joining USGIF, CAP gains additional opportunities to collaborate with leading geospatial organizations, technology companies, educational institutions, and government partners. And that excites Kaplan, who says the membership will increase visibility of CAP’s missions and volunteer capabilities within the larger geospatial enterprise. At last, the world will know that CAP volunteers can overlay flood polygons on a map like absolute professionals.
The benefits extend beyond CAP itself. USGIF’s mission centers on “Building the Community, Advancing the Tradecraft, and Accelerating Innovation,” bringing together professionals and organizations from across the geospatial ecosystem. Through CAP’s membership, the broader USGIF community gains access to an organization that combines aviation, emergency services, STEM education, youth development, and operational geospatial capabilities in ways few organizations can. Yes, vanishingly few groups can claim both actual airplanes and teenagers staring at maps.
The partnership also creates opportunities for increased collaboration, including educational resources, scholarships, networking events, working groups, and conferences such as the GEOINT Symposium. These connections help expose CAP members to real-world applications of geospatial intelligence across disaster response, aviation, environmental monitoring, infrastructure, defense, public safety, and national security. Real-world applications like confirming from space that, yes, that neighborhood is still underwater.
Introducing America’s Youth to GEOINT
CAP’s cadet programs and Geospatial STEM initiatives also introduce younger generations to geospatial technologies and careers, helping develop future talent pipelines for the GEOINT workforce. Because every 16-year-old’s dream is a career analyzing satellite imagery of parking lots.
A major program goal was reached in June when CAP hosted its first-ever National Geospatial Academy, one of the organization’s 40 National Cadet Special Activities offered each summer. Twenty-one cadets from across the nation were brought to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and introduced to the entire geospatial community. This included discussions with some of the most senior leaders and connectors in the industry, plus visits to agencies, industry, and academia — including a tour of the Pentagon and FEMA’s National Response Coordination Center. Nothing prepares young people for a life of map analysis quite like visiting the buildings where maps decide wars and hurricane responses.
Future Collaborations in the Works
CAP’s partnership with USGIF will provide extraordinary opportunities for cadets. In 2027, a select group of CAP cadets will attend the GEOINT Symposium in Orlando, Florida, where they will engage with leaders from government, industry, and academia while exploring the cutting-edge technologies, innovations, and career paths shaping the future of geospatial intelligence. Think Comic-Con, but for people who get excited about satellite resolution and GIS layers. They can ride Space Mountain and then debate the latest in spatial analytics.
As CAP continues to modernize and expand its geospatial capabilities, membership in USGIF reinforces a shared commitment to education, innovation, collaboration, and service. Together, CAP and USGIF are helping strengthen connections between technology, geospatial intelligence, emergency response, and the next generation of leaders who will shape the future of the geospatial profession — a future in which everyone owns a drone and a GIS certification.
Join CAP’s Geospatial Volunteers
The CAP Geospatial Program and its damage assessment teams are open to any CAP member regardless of age or other diversity measure. Everyone is welcome. Yes, even you, the person who still thinks GIS is some kind of fuel.