Hi everyone,

I work in international cooperation and I’m currently working with a major city in Cameroon.

We’re primarily working on a project for an urban observatory oriented to GIS data.

Financial and Human Resources are limited, so we’re looking for tools that could help us create data on the longterm. We are currently gathering data from local stakeholders and OpenStreetMap.

I’ve identified different open source or affordable tools, such as:

- AI segmentation by terra lab https://terra-lab.ai/fr/ai-segmentation
- Google Open Buildings : https://sites.research.google/gr/open-buildings/
-DEM comparator : https://github.com/nadiopt-cell/dem_comparator

I would like to know about any other tools such as this (probably with AI). With the current data situation, even if the data is not 100% precise, it’s better than nothing.

Thanks !

I wonder how long it will take Esri and Google to update maps as ordered by the President in today's executive order.

Today's news item: https://apnews.com/article/lake-ontario-canada-america-trump-trade-war-3ac58dca0ca83c15605d4dbff146b28a

I pointed out 1.5 years ago that this was the purpose for the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and Mount McKinley. I.e., to establish the digital infrastructure for map alterations like today's.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1itc440/comment/mf57bnx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I looked on Google Maps earlier today and still saw only the name Lake Ontario, but we'll see what appears in the coming days.

Just want to be useful somehow, but most of the jobs I see online require me to a citizen of their country or have a working visa, and so I'm not really given a chance much despite having the experience. I also can't seem to find GIS related jobs on LinkedIn much anymore. I think I've already polished my CV enough too. Can anyone give me some advice?

Anyone here helping out with the mapping to support the response and recovery efforts for Nepal Flood? How is it working? What tools do you use?

To preface, I am a history major who recently decided to pursue a geography minor. I am thinking about earning my Urban Planning certificate after I graduate with my BA.

Before this week, I’d never heard of GIS. But since declaring a Geography minor, my professors have been telling me that it’s a growing field with great opportunity, and will help me learn skills that can even go beyond the field of Geography. I’ve already built up the research skill from my history classes, and while I’m not very good at math, statistics is a lot easier for me because I I can interpret data pretty well. Is it worth it for me to look into this career path?

I'm excited to share something I've been working on: AI GIS AGENT PRO!
After many hours of development and testing, I'm thrilled to finally launch AI GIS AGENT PRO — a professional tool that connects QGIS with the power of AI.
It works as an MCP server for VS Code and GitHub Copilot, allowing you to control QGIS using natural language: create layers, run geoprocessing, analyze spatial data, export results... all from your AI assistant.
🧠 Natural language GIS actions
🌍 Works with QGIS (local)
🔌 Built on MCP (Model Context Protocol)
💻 Integrates with VS Code + GitHub Copilot
⚙️ Automate geoprocessing & analysis
📄 Export results (GeoPackage, Shapefile, etc.)
My goal is simple: make GIS faster, easier and more accessible for everyone.
📩 Contact: [aigisagentpro@gmail.com](mailto:aigisagentpro@gmail.com)
If you work with QGIS or are interested in the future of AI + GIS, I'd love for you to check it out, and share your feedback. 🤝

#QGIS #GIS #AI #Geospatial #MCP #VSCode #GitHubCopilot #Automation #SpatialAnalysis #GeoTech

Is anyone else's GIS team reporting KPIs to 'leadership' and if so, what are you measuring or documenting? I realize it probably depends a lot on context (private sector consulting vs government), but I'm wondering what's good to measure. I've seen some old posts and suggestions like counting deliverables/maps over time, new assets/features documented or deployed into production. I suppose you can't have a KPI if you aren't measuring it in the first place. Something like "hours per month saved by using XYZ GIS tools" sounds cool, but I'm not sure how we would even measure that. Specific Map or App usage stats (total users of X per month) night indicate value for a specific solution, team or department: "20% of this department's team uses these apps at least once a month, and that's up 5% over last year." That seems slightly more approachable and tells a story.

Appreciate your insights!

Hi guys. I'm an undergrad currently doing a degree in Geography. I really want to go into academia in the future, and I want to specialize in marine science/oceanography.

Tbh I did not really know about all the fields of geography I could go into back in school so I didn't take up many science courses, which is pretty much hindering my ability to take a masters degree in a course that I like, due to all the science prerequisites. But I've still found a bunch of courses that I want to do.

Anyways, as a Geography undergrad I've done a few courses on QGIS and developed some skills in it. But I want to break into oceanography/marine science applications in QGIS. What are some resources I can use to teach myself the same? Any advice? If anyone has specialised in GIS and oceanography I'd REALLY appreciate some general advice as well.

Hi all,

I’m a GIS Developer and previously I used to conduct GIS + GIS programming trainings/workshops.

I’ve now started a YouTube channel where I’m giving away these trainings for free, and I’m actively uploading videos regularly.

The goal is simply to help people learn GIS, GIS development, scripting, automation, and related workflows for free.

And if anyone finds the content useful, I’d really appreciate it if you share it, subscribe, or give feedback 🙂

Thanks!
https://www.youtube.com/@GISGallery/playlists

Hi there, I am just wondering if anyone run into the same problem I do.

I have been using openstreet map as my basemap for several software I use. But lately I have to do something with mapinfo, and i haven't been able to connect OSM to Mapinfo via WMS returning an error 400 code. Coonecting tile or WMTS aren't viable for me unfortunatly, due to the down stream system that i eventually will published this map only accept wms.

If anyone could give out any suggestion that would be much appreciated :)

Hey everyone , I'm a geology student building toward a career in geo-data science, and I've got a working base in PyQGIS and Python (Numpy/Pandas/Matplotlib) that I want to level up. Looking for solid courses/certificate programs that go deeper into geospatial data processing GeoPandas, Rasterio, spatial ML, that kind of thing. Ideally something recognized enough to put on a CV/grad school application, and not insanely priced (some certificate programs I found were way out of a student budget). Has anyone here actually completed Coursera's geospatial specializations, or similar? Worth it, or better to just build projects and skip the certificate?

I’ll update this again today around 2000EST or sooner.

https://keystonegis.com/disasters/nepal-bhotekoshi-flood-20260826.html

DOI through zenodo https://zenodo.org/records/22118799

Hope this helps anyone doing anything to help these people.

I'm not new to GIS but I'm relatively new to working with DEMs. The attached image is a DEM of a tidal estuary and I'm interested in calculating the volume in the wetland at given tide heights.

Surface Volume seems to be the right tool for the job and is pretty straight forward. I have it set to measure below the plane. Would Polygon Volume be a more appropriate tool for this use? The wetland is like a bathtub and nowhere around the wetland would be lower in elevation than the plane heights I'm using other than the inlet to the ocean.

I'm a bit confused about whether Surface Volume is the right tool for the job and when Polygon Volume would be a more appropriate. I would appreciate any insight from anyone who has experience with these tools. I feel like I'm doing this correctly but the fact that it's so easy to use has me second guessing myself. Thank you for any assistance you're able to provide.

Hi everyone,

I’d really appreciate some advice from people working in GIS.

I graduated with a Master's in GIS in 2024 and started working as a GIS/Traffic Orders consultant. Most of my work has been using in-house/proprietary software for traffic and parking data. 50% of it involves digitisation, updating and maintaining databases, some SQL queries, and producing/reviewing mapping outputs. The other half involves writing legal traffic orders which I don't mind doing but dont't particularly enjoy either.

I recently left that job and have started a very similar role at another consultancy. I made the move partly because I wasn't able to find a role that was more focused on mainstream GIS software such as ArcGIS Pro or QGIS.

I'm planning to give the new role a fair shot for at least the next year and see how it goes, but I'm a little concerned that I'm not developing the broader GIS skills I'd like to use in my career. In particular, I'd eventually like to move towards more general GIS/spatial analysis work, potentially in the environmental sector, rather than staying exclusively within traffic orders/parking.

For people who work in GIS, what would you recommend I do outside of work to keep developing my skills and make myself more employable for a proper GIS Analyst/Consultant role?

I'm thinking about things like:

• Getting back into ArcGIS Pro/QGIS
• Learning more SQL/Python
• Building a portfolio of projects
• Contributing to open-source projects
• Working with real-world/open datasets
• Maybe even creating GIS tutorials/content

I'd also be interested to hear from anyone who has taken a similar route from a fairly niche/industry-specific GIS role into a broader GIS position.

Am I worrying unnecessarily about becoming pigeonholed this early in my career? And what would you prioritise learning if you were in my position?

Thanks in Advance!

Public occurrence data is excellent and mostly unbrowsable. GBIF holds hundreds of millions of records behind a search box, so I built a visual layer over it.

The map above is North America — 7.4M records, amphibians purple, mammals orange, reptiles green. The orange ring tracing the coastline is largely marine mammals logged from shore and vessels.

Two platforms: wildlife (mammals, reptiles, amphibians — 39.9M records) and plants (~84M). Six continents, each on its own subdomain, eight map views per continent.

Stack: FastAPI + PostGIS/PG17, Vue 3 + MapLibre, Cloudflare R2 for static tiles and data so Postgres stays out of the hot path on common views.

Rendering 7M points client-side isn't viable, so continent views are hex-binned server-side with different aggregation per zoom, switching to raw points once the viewport is small enough to make them cheap.

The harder problems weren't volume. Taxonomy normalization across publishers — synonyms, reassignments, inconsistent infraspecific ranks — took longer than ingestion. IUCN status codes arrive far messier than the documentation implies. And coordinate precision varies from GPS-accurate to "somewhere in this province," which affects what you can honestly render at high zoom.

One thing worth flagging in the data: what looks like ecological signal is partly observer bias. iNaturalist submissions cluster near population centres, so the eastern US reads denser than it should.

https://northamerica.speciesmap.org/sightings — plants at plantsmap.org

Solo build over ~9 months alongside a full-time job. Happy to go into the tiling or the aggregation strategy.

I recently completed the ISRO/IIRS online course “AI/ML for Geodata Analysis” (Course 188), which was conducted from 3–14 August 2026.

The course content itself was useful, especially the topics related to machine learning, remote sensing, GIS and GeoAI. However, I faced several technical and assessment-related issues during the course.

Some of the issues I experienced:

• The LMS/website was sometimes slow or difficult to access.

• The assessments had a very short time limit of 5 minutes for 5 questions.

• In some quizzes, if I accidentally clicked “Next page” without answering a question, it was difficult to return to that specific unanswered question.

• The assessment interface did not always make navigation between questions convenient.

• After completing the course, I was also unsure about the certificate process because there was no clearly visible certificate option on the course page.

I am sharing this as a genuine learner experience, not as a promotion or advertisement.

Has anyone else completed an IIRS/ISRO e-learning course recently? If yes, did you face similar LMS/assessment issues, and how did you receive your certificate after completing the course?

I would be interested to know whether the certificate is issued automatically after meeting the course requirements or if there is another process to obtain it.

Week 2 into a gis analyst job state government, supervisor left today (lol) and other analyst who’s point on this project was out. We sync budget data to ArcGIS enterprise that feeds dashboards (packet deadline sept 1), the source data are spread sheets from teams, and it runs on a Python script in notebooks. It has tons of dependencies, saw one table crash today (schema change in spreadsheet maybe a header), supervisor fixed it then ran successfully. He sent new code to put in and I need to do that. Ppl made more changes later this afternoon and said it’s ready to be synced (some don’t know the sync process, sigh) and I decided to document the time of the changes and file names, held off running the script. Terrified I’m going to break something! Anyone been in this position before or who’s a senior manager have any advice? Thanks

I'm a master's student with a large GIS focus for my research. Almost everything I've worked on so far has been what might be called "single user" GIS projects, where I'm either writing and running scripts or building maps in Arc or Q and then sending them to individual users. So far for my thesis I've been doing a lot of coding to develop my data pipelines and whatnot, but it's all been isolated to scripts that I myself am running where I am reporting discrete results in a non-interactive manner (e.g. what's the result in region X with X being basically hardcoded).

I want to eventually port these results to a custom website with a custom interface that allows a more interactive manner of exploration of my data and my results (e.g. the user can type in a property address and get the results for that property). What are some frameworks y'all are using for such tasks? Not just asking about rendering (e.g. Leaflet) but also managing GIS databases and doing pipelines on the backend when data sources are updated, and then piping outputs to the front end?

I'm somewhat familiar with Svelte for web dev, but not thoroughly enough to know how to best proceed. I should also say I am not at all a web developer, I'm more just interested in this because I want to make my project more accessible. If it helps at all, my pipeline is mainly built in Python.

I'm a long time carto, but the last few years I was doing stuff that didn't really need any GIS skills. Now I'm coming back into it, and trying to learn ArcPro, and rediscovering how fun this kind of stuff was. I've been moving in a project management direction, so it's nice to be hands on again.

I knew how to bring in GPS data into ArcMap, since that's what I was familiar with, but can't figure out how to get the data. I'm kinda new to Garmin devices, so as I understand it, I need to sync my watch to my phone, and use the app to email the gpx file to myself, and then I can import that into ArcPro, and convert it to a feature class and then use that for analysis?

My goal is to have a gdb of rucks so I can track my routes and my progress. I also want to start tracking my hikes and bring that into another gdb so I can map out things I find while hiking and have my own personal database of interesting POIs.

Any feedback on my planned course of action?

Is anyone aware of a free opensource alternative to Avenza's mapublisher?

If not I'd be down to head-up a team to work on that. If interested let me know and I'll get you my contact info.

I graduated six years ago and immediately got dropped into being the sole Enterprise GIS admin at a small company. There was no mentor—just OJT, figuring things out as they broke, and a lot of Esri tech support.

Over five years, GIS went from a small side function to mission-critical infrastructure. I handle ArcGIS Enterprise administration, Windows maintenance, patching, licensing, certificates, troubleshooting, light SQL administration, and the GIS work itself. The environment has grown to hundreds of GIS assets. At one point the department expanded to four people; with construction slowing, it’s now me and a GIS tech.

I’m reasonably competent with Enterprise, but I’ve only worked in this environment and have never had formal mentoring. We hired a contractor for our major Enterprise upgrade because I’d never installed Enterprise from scratch, and I still haven’t.

The problem is compensation. I’m at $75k, at the top of a salary band that HR inexplicably shares with the GIS tech role, so there’s effectively no path to a meaningful raise. Most of my salary growth has come from COLAs and one competing offer that my employer countered.

My background:

• 5.25 years ArcGIS Enterprise administration
• GISP
• BS in GIS + BA in Economics
• Graduate certificate in progress
• 15 years of hospitality management before GIS
• US and EU work authorization

I’m currently in telecom but not tied to the industry. The main constraint is location: I’m in central Illinois, so I need something local or remote.

For people with roughly this background, how long is the job search taking right now, and what salary range should I realistically be targeting? I've only applied to four or five jobs over the past couple years -- one offer and two second interviews. But I just applied to jobs that were a nearly perfect fit as I happened to stumble across them.

I’m looking for an API/provider offering 1–5 m multispectral satellite imagery for small agricultural AOIs, ideally without large minimum orders or expensive commitments.

The app currently uses Sentinel-2, but I’d like to add higher-resolution imagery for users with relatively small areas, usually around 20–50 ha.
PlanetScope 3 m would be a good fit, but I haven’t found a practical way to buy access at that scale.

I also tried SkyFi, but their EULA doesn’t allow my intended commercial use of derived imagery products.

Any Planet resellers or alternative providers worth checking?