2022 Peter S. Thacher Award Recipient: Rick Chormann
Presented by Shane Brandt at the 2022 Fall NEARC Conference:
Tonight, I have the great honor of announcing this year's winner of the Peter S Thacher Award. The Thacher Award is a memorial to Peter Shaw Thacher of Stonington, Connecticut, who lived by the phrase "Think Global, Act Local." This award recognizes individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to and excellence in using GIS technology to achieve success in natural resource management and conservation. Peter was a pioneer in using modern computer mapping technologies to develop environmentally-sound planning policies and he was both an active member of NEARC and an outspoken advocate for GIS.
I'm pleased to announce that the winner of the 2022 Thacher Award is Rick Chormann.
Rick is a passionate believer in the power of GIS to solve real-world problems, and devoted many hours of his career to the research on, and use of, GIS techniques to achieve these ends. Rick was an initial pioneer of GIS in the state of New Hampshire. He was an original member of the New Hampshire GIS Advisory Committee, a group of GIS users across state government that met regularly to share ideas and inform other agencies about ongoing projects.
In his career at the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, Rick brought his GIS skills to bear on a wide range of projects, including the Water Well Inventory, the Water Use Reporting and Registration Program, a hydrological stress basins analysis, and fluvial erosion hazard projects. Rick also strongly promoted the use of the National Hydrography Dataset, and its tracing functions, and spearheaded a stewardship agreement between the New Hampshire Geological Survey and the USGS for state-level management of this resource.
Much of Rick’s 11-year tenure as State Geologist and Director of the New Hampshire Geological Survey was dedicated to acquiring the statewide LiDAR dataset that the people of New Hampshire are now using for a wide range of applications. This required significant administrative work to put together capital budget requests and matching funds over a 10-year span to make this statewide dataset, that we take for granted today, a reality. The existence of statewide LiDAR dataset in New Hampshire perhaps represents the most visible example of Rick's long-term legacy to the state.
Rick continued to enthusiastically promote use of GIS all the way to his retirement in 2021. One of his most recent projects was the establishment the NH Stone Wall Mapper and Stone Wall Mapping Workgroup. The NH Stone Wall Mapper an ArcGIS Online based viewer which allows citizens to use crowdsourcing to not only digitize stone walls, but to provide them an opportunity to interact with the statewide LiDAR dataset that Rick had dedicated much of this time as State Geologist toward collecting. I personally had the pleasure of working closely with Rick on the NH Stonewall Mapper over the past few years and I can attest firsthand to his undoubted passion and dedication toward using GIS to captivate, inform, and inspire people.
Please join me in congratulating Rick in this well deserved award.
Tonight, I have the great honor of announcing this year's winner of the Peter S Thacher Award. The Thacher Award is a memorial to Peter Shaw Thacher of Stonington, Connecticut, who lived by the phrase "Think Global, Act Local." This award recognizes individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to and excellence in using GIS technology to achieve success in natural resource management and conservation. Peter was a pioneer in using modern computer mapping technologies to develop environmentally-sound planning policies and he was both an active member of NEARC and an outspoken advocate for GIS.
I'm pleased to announce that the winner of the 2022 Thacher Award is Rick Chormann.
Rick is a passionate believer in the power of GIS to solve real-world problems, and devoted many hours of his career to the research on, and use of, GIS techniques to achieve these ends. Rick was an initial pioneer of GIS in the state of New Hampshire. He was an original member of the New Hampshire GIS Advisory Committee, a group of GIS users across state government that met regularly to share ideas and inform other agencies about ongoing projects.
In his career at the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, Rick brought his GIS skills to bear on a wide range of projects, including the Water Well Inventory, the Water Use Reporting and Registration Program, a hydrological stress basins analysis, and fluvial erosion hazard projects. Rick also strongly promoted the use of the National Hydrography Dataset, and its tracing functions, and spearheaded a stewardship agreement between the New Hampshire Geological Survey and the USGS for state-level management of this resource.
Much of Rick’s 11-year tenure as State Geologist and Director of the New Hampshire Geological Survey was dedicated to acquiring the statewide LiDAR dataset that the people of New Hampshire are now using for a wide range of applications. This required significant administrative work to put together capital budget requests and matching funds over a 10-year span to make this statewide dataset, that we take for granted today, a reality. The existence of statewide LiDAR dataset in New Hampshire perhaps represents the most visible example of Rick's long-term legacy to the state.
Rick continued to enthusiastically promote use of GIS all the way to his retirement in 2021. One of his most recent projects was the establishment the NH Stone Wall Mapper and Stone Wall Mapping Workgroup. The NH Stone Wall Mapper an ArcGIS Online based viewer which allows citizens to use crowdsourcing to not only digitize stone walls, but to provide them an opportunity to interact with the statewide LiDAR dataset that Rick had dedicated much of this time as State Geologist toward collecting. I personally had the pleasure of working closely with Rick on the NH Stonewall Mapper over the past few years and I can attest firsthand to his undoubted passion and dedication toward using GIS to captivate, inform, and inspire people.
Please join me in congratulating Rick in this well deserved award.
