Sean Hogan attended the 1st Statewide California Naturalist Conference, which took place at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove CA this weekend (October 17th to 19th), and has provided us with this report. By all accounts the conference was a resounding success.  There were a number of fantastic presentations and workshops held at the event. Sean Hogan from IGIS provided an advanced training for global positioning systems (GPS) and mobile field data collection.  One of the highlights of the GPS training was comparing a sophisticated high end Trimble

Geo XH GPS with the ability of smartphones to collect similar GPS data using modern day apps.  This map reflects the remarkable accuracy of a Samsung Galaxy II, using the Oruxmaps GPS app, compared to a simultaneously collected track recorded with the Trimble GPS (the latter of which reported an outstanding average horizontal accuracy of 0.8 m along a 2.5 km trek).  The greatest difference between the two recorded tracks was 5.7 meters.  While this is not bad, the majority of the track recorded by the smartphone fell within 1.5 meters of the Trimble's track.