PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
April 2019
249
ROGER E. CRYSTAL
Roger Crystal is an independent Geospatial Information – Information Technology consultant who
has over 40 years of work experience as a Senior Leader with diverse management experience in the
Geospatial and Information Technology profession. He possesses a unique blend of leadership and
business management acumen demonstrated in Strategic Planning, Project Management, Business
Development and implementation of large projects.
Crystal started his Geospatial career in 1967 with the Washington State Department of Highways
as a Senior Photogrammetrist. Since then, Crystal has provided surveying and mapping expertise for
activities in Saudi Arabia; established region-wide remote sensing, aerial photography and mapping
programs for the Forest Service; served as the technical lead for the mapping and classification of land
cover in support of the spotted owl controversy; and many others. He joined ASPRS in 1975 and has
served on the ASPRS Board of Directors and is currently on the ASPRS Foundation Board of Trustees. He is a Fellow of ASPRS
and has received numerous ASPRS awards.
What significant changes have you seen in your
field during your career?
Over the past few years,
and spatial information science have witnessed great achieve-
ments, mainly due to technological changes worldwide. Recent
years have also seen significant progress in automatic image
orientation, surface reconstruction, scene analysis, change
detection, classification and information extraction with the
help of data mining, spatial statistics and machine learning.
Photogrammetric and the Geospatial sciences have been
strongly influenced by information and communication tech-
nology, computer vision and robotics. With the development of
active remote sensing techniques such as lidar and Radar for
obtaining point cloud data, the opportunities for data collec-
tion, analysis and integration have increased tremendously.
Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) has opened various new
applications in the close-range domain, combining aerial and
terrestrial photogrammetry and has introduced a low-cost
alternative to the classical manned aerial photogrammetry.
What would you consider to be the most import-
ant advice you could offer a younger, upcoming
scientist / engineer?
Technical competency is very important, so when you start your
career in the geospatial sciences, learn as many techniques
as you can, this will help you tackle an array of problems in
the future. Also make sure that you learn the basic concepts
in relevant disciplines, but always with a critical mind and
without trying to know it all. Most importantly, make friends
with people in the geospatial field, because these peers will
soon be your most trusted collaborators or your competition.
Become an active member in a professional society and go to
conferences, such as the ASPRS annual conference or local
Regional conferences. Give lots of talks, chat with lots of people,
make connections, find out where the jobs are, find out what
people are working on. Have fun and be friendly!
How important do you think interdisciplinary
collaboration will be for solving some of the
challenges that lie ahead in our field?
Interdisciplinary collaboration is a complex process in which
different types of geospatial disciplines work together to share
expertise, knowledge, and skills to impact the profession. It
is the realization and acceptance that each discipline has
a different priority in regards to the geospatial activity at
hand. I believe we have interdisciplinary cooperation now
and we will need to have more in the future to meet the new
challenges ahead.
Where would you like to see ASPRS in 85 years?
That is a difficult question. ASPRS has changed drastically
since its founding in 1934 and it will continue to change in the
future. ASPRS must be willing to adapt to the ever-changing
field of the geospatial sciences and reach out to all disciplines
working in the profession. I don’t believe that ASPRS can be
the champion of every geospatial discipline, but could be a
professional society leader in the geospatial profession. I would
like to see one overall professional society with professional
divisions under the professional society leader.
