Welcome and Introduction to Conference 11863

A warm welcome to all participants of our conference! My name is Karsten Schulz. I am the conference chair of Earth Resources and Environmental Remote Sensing & GIS Applications. I am glad that I am supported by my two excellent Co-Chairs Konstantinos Nikolakopoulos and Ulrich Michel. We all are deeply impressed by our faithful community. Already last year I expressed my gratitude about our faithful community because despite these horrible pandemic situation we had a stable number of submissions and very interesting scientific contributions. I could not imagine that we will receive nearly 50% more submissions this year. Our Program includes more than 50 scientific contributions submitted by researchers from 22 countries. 14 countries from Europe and the other covers nearly all parts of the world. So I hope you all will use the chance to hear these interesting high quality talks on demand in the next days. Especially our involved young scientists deserve your attention. So, it is all the more regrettable that we have again not the chance to meet us in person. I really miss to meet you all - our faithful participant - and our lively discussion of the presented contribution - face to face. - and the discussions how we could improve our conference. Nevertheless, also in these difficult times, we extended our topics and organized a special session with more than 10 scientific contributions. I am referring to the session "Satellite Remote Sensing and Ground-based Nondestructive Technologies in Civil and Environmental Engineering". Chaired by Luca Bianchini Ciampoli from the University of Roma Tree and (Prof.) Fabio Tosti from the University of West London. Perhaps you remember Valerio Gagliardi also associated with Roma Tree. After his interesting talk concerning InSAR last year we discussed to introduce this new session and I have to confess he and his colleagues' were very successful to organize it and we have many interesting contributions for this topic. But I really have to talk with them about the length of their session name. It is really a pity that we again will not have complete live sessions and that instead we will again meet us only in an about 2 hours long networking event. Under the impression that we heard all Security Defence Conferences and most remote sensing conferences choosed networking sessions and also the Optical System Design Conference will have only one streaming event we also thought it would be better to go this way again. One problem was that due to limited time for a complete live streaming event all presentation should have been shortened to about 8 minutes. But the uploaded long version of about 20 minutes would still have been necessary. I thought that would be very confusing. However, I hope that you all will help me to organize a successful networking event. I will invite all session chairs to tell us a little bit about the developments in their session and to identify one or two topics in their session which we can discuss during the networking event. At the end of the session we will discuss the future development of our conference and I hope we will see lively discussions. My best wishes for you all and I hope I will see you in our networking event! And please take care and stay healthy!