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This alternative format session provides a forum for human factors scholars and practitioners to showcase how state-of-the-art extended reality (XR) applications are being used in academia, defense, and industry to address human factors research. The session will begin with short introductions from each presenter to describe their XR application. Afterward, session attendees will engage with the presenters and their demonstrations, which will be set up around the demonstration floor room. This year’s showcase features XR applications in STEM education, medical and aviation training, agricultural data visualization, homeland security, training design, and visitor engagement in informal learning settings. Our goal is for attendees to experience how human factors professionals use XR to support human factors-oriented research and to learn about the exciting work being conducted with these emerging technologies. 

The conservation field is experiencing a rapid increase in the amount, variety, and quality of spatial data that can help us understand species movement and landscape connectivity patterns. As interest grows in more dynamic representations of movement potential, modelers are often limited by the capacity of their analytic tools to handle these datasets. Technology developments in software and high-performance computing are rapidly emerging in many fields, but uptake within conservation may lag, as our tools or our choice of computing language can constrain our ability to keep pace. We recently updated Circuitscape, a widely used connectivity analysis tool developed by Brad McRae and Viral Shah, by implementing it in Julia, a high-performance computing language. In this initial re-code (Circuitscape 5.0) and later updates, we improved computational efficiency and parallelism, achieving major speed improvements, and enabling assessments across larger extents or with higher resolution data. Here, we reflect on the benefits to conservation of strengthening collaborations with computer scientists, and extract examples from a collection of 572 Circuitscape applications to illustrate how through a decade of repeated investment in the software, applications have been many, varied, and increasingly dynamic. Beyond empowering continued innovations in dynamic connectivity, we expect that faster run times will play an important role in facilitating co-production of connectivity assessments with stakeholders, increasing the likelihood that connectivity science will be incorporated in land use decisions.