2026 Northeastern (NEMO) & Southern (SOMENS) Mensurationists Joint Annual Meeting – November 8-10 in Portland, ME
New for this year – the meeting with include an afternoon workshop on Using Tidymodels in Forest Modeling Workflows led by Matt Russell of Arbor Analytics on Tuesday 11/10.
The 2026 Meeting will be in Portland, Maine. Great food scene, walkable Old Port district, fantastic craft beer, and right on the water with the Maine coast nearby for folks who want to extend their stay.
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About the group: NEMO is an informal gathering of forest biometricians and mensurationists from across the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada that has met annually since the early 1980s. The group stays deliberately small and collegial, with a mix of academics, agency scientists, and industry practitioners.
About the event: The point of our meetings is a real scientific conversation without the noise of a bigger conference. If you work on growth modeling, forest inventory, remote sensing calibration, or sampling design, this is the room where you’ll find your people. Graduate or even undergraduate students are very welcome, and there’s a strong mentoring tradition.
Who should attend: Forest biometricians, mensurationists, growth and yield modelers, inventory analysts, remote sensing scientists, and anyone who thinks carefully about how we measure and model forests.
Registration is open!
Early bird registration – $555 until 9/15
Regular registration – $655 starts 9/16
Student registration – $400 (price does not change)
Interested in supporting our mensurationists groups? Sponsorships are available!
Platinum sponsorship – $2000
Gold Sponsorship – $1000
Silver Sponsorship – $500
Each sponsorship will get recognition at the event and in the event booklet.
Click here for our refund and cancellation policy.
The meeting will take place just one block from Portland Harbor at the
Cambria Hotel Portland Downtown Old Port
25 Hancock St, Portland, ME 04101
A block of discounted hotel rooms has been reserved for this event at $144/per night + taxes.
Use the Booking link to reserve your room by 10/8
Please note: The booking link will show the price as $174 a night including a ‘$27.25 per night Hotel Amenity Fee’ during the booking process. This fee will be waived at the hotel level for our group. When you check in, there will be no fee attached to your reservations.
Unfamiliar with Cambria? Cambria is the “Ritz-Carlton” of the Choice Hotels family. Cambria hotels offer modern, design-forward accommodations with local flair and the chance to enjoy little indulgences.
Welcome icebreaker – Land & Sea options
Afternoon sunset boat trip sponsored Foster Forestry
Evening meet-up at hotel bar
Hospitality suite for continued evening networking
All-day meeting
Evening reception and flash talks at Rigby Yard
Half-day morning meeting
Lunch – provided
Half-day afternoon workshop – Using Tidymodels in Forest Modeling Workflows
Background: Forest modelers are often faced with challenges in developing and implementing the models they create. This includes the need to work with very large datasets, train models to specific attributes like species or ecoregions, and assess different modeling approaches such as regression and machine learning techniques. The ability to generate code and assess their impact has never been easier in our profession, but forest modelers often require reproducible workflows that allow their modeling systems to be flexible as new data become available.
The tidymodels package in R is a series of packages for performing modeling and machine learning tasks. This workshop will provide an overview of the tidymodels packages and how it can be used in forest modeling workflows. A case study estimating tree biomass from trees collected across the US will be used throughout the workshop.
Attendees should bring a laptop with R installed (e.g., RStudio/Positron). The workshop is best suited for attendees with at least some experience with coding in R.
Learner outcomes:
(1) Understand the core packages and functions within tidymodels and how they can be used for common forest modeling scenarios.
(2) Be able to design workflows that allow for training and testing models to evaluate and validate their performance.
(3) Understand how to work with model output in an efficient manner so that results can be easily interpreted and visualized.
