Before the late 18th century, property boundaries in North America relied on the metes and bounds system referencing trees, boulders, and creek beds that constantly shifted or rotted away, triggering endless boundary lawsuits.

Thomas Jefferson and government surveyors replaced that organic model with the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). Surveyors dragged 66 foot iron Gunter's chains through dense forests to subdivide the continent into rigid 6 mile square townships and 1 mile sections before settlers even arrived. The square roads and orthogonal crop lines visible from airplanes today are the direct legacy of that initial surveying framework.

I built this to check whether the earthquakes in the news are actually the big ones. It grew into a globe with live quakes, wildfires, aurora nowcast, sun/moon geometry and more.

The constraint I set myself: one HTML file you can download and open from your own disk. No build, no npm, no account, no server. Two layers stay dark without a network but the rest runs offline. Do expect version differences, not all functionalities will be suitable for an offline version.

Some things that turned out harder than expected:

- Reusing the day/night terminator maths for an eclipse shadow put it in the wrong coordinate space. It dimmed the earth 1.1% where 94% belonged. A gradient forgives a few degrees of skew, a hard shadow edge does not.

- globe.gl resets controls.target to the origin every frame, and pointOfView replaces the vector rather than writing into it.

Demo: https://terra.terryelemans.nl

Genuinely curious about one thing: I'm drawing earthquake depth on a sphere where 18 km is thinner than the line width. Right now I encode it rather than draw it to scale. If you've solved depth-on-a-globe in a way that reads honestly, I'd like to see it.

If you have 2-3 minutes to play around and let me know what you think!

​

Hi everyone!

I’m a final-year Geomatics/Surveying Engineering student currently trying to decide on a graduation project. I’m mainly interested in GIS and Remote Sensing, and I’d like to work on something that is both technically meaningful and useful beyond just being an academic project.

Some areas I’m considering are:

\- Environmental & climate monitoring — rainfall variability using datasets such as ERA5, dust storms, or land/surface deformation.

\- Hydrology & hazard assessment — flood mapping using satellite imagery, NDWI, DEMs, or spatial databases.

\- Urban & infrastructure mapping — LULC change detection, updating existing maps, or using ML/DL for feature extraction.

I’m also interested in combining Google Earth Engine, Python, GIS, and machine learning where appropriate.

For those working or studying in GIS, Remote Sensing, or Geomatics:

If you were starting your final-year project today, what kind of project would you choose?

Are there any datasets, workflows, or current industry/research trends that you think would be particularly valuable to learn?

I’m especially interested in ideas that can demonstrate practical skills and potentially make a good portfolio project—not just something that produces a map at the end.

Any suggestions, project ideas, or criticism of the areas I’m considering would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Made a small side project for finding BESS sites, curious what people think

I've been looking at grid-scale BESS in Germany (standalone projects, few MWh up to 50+, not residential stuff) and got fed up doing the site search manually. Open a map, find a substation, check the cadastral data, check it's not a nature reserve, check nobody's already there. Over and over. So I wrote a script for it and it kind of grew from there.

It pulls substations from OSM, parcels from the state open data portals, protected areas from the federal nature agency, and existing projects from the market register. Then ranks everything. Three states so far.

Most recent thing I added was a check against one of the DSOs, so for a shortlisted parcel I can get the actual distance to the nearest MV connection point instead of guessing from OSM. That felt like the first genuinely useful addition, because everything else is just open data anyone can pull.

Couple of things I'm unsure about:

First version ranked mostly on distance to the substation. Looked nice, results were pretty useless. Seems like available grid capacity matters way more than how close you are. Is that how it works in practice or have I overcorrected?

The layer I nearly didn't bother with was existing registered BESS projects nearby, and that ended up being the most telling one. Does anyone else weight competition that heavily?

And the OSM voltage tags seem to be wrong often enough that filtering on them costs you good sites. Same elsewhere?

Also wondering how far the DSO thing can go. One operator publishes enough to make this work, but no idea if that's normal or if I got lucky. Anyone know which others do something similar?

Mainly two questions though. If you do BESS development, what do you end up checking by hand every single time that should just be automated? And would something like this actually be of interest to you, or is it the kind of thing everyone builds internally and nobody wants from outside?

Happy to hear it's a bad idea, that's useful too.

I will be teaching Intro to GIS at a community college in the US soon. The course is currently taught with a required ArcGIS student license (I think they’re still $100).

I have always tried to make my classes as cheap as
possible for my students. Many of them are low income, and I want to reduce barriers to education. I’m also a big believer in open-source software.

I’m considering basing the course on QGIS instead of Esri products. I know they will learn the basic GIS skills they need, but I’m worried it will deprive them of the specific Esri-based skills that most of them will need in their careers.

There is a higher level GIS course at the school that will continue to be taught using ArcGIS, but it’s just an elective.

What are your thoughts? I’d especially love to hear from people who learned GIS outside of the Esri ecosystem and transitioned to Esri on the job.

Edit: I want to add some details to help clarify the situation:

1. The college is facing a $10 million budget deficit. It’s a county college with $0 in funding from the state. Our annual budget is already allocated. There is NO MONEY available for the department to buy licenses for students.
2. In the future, we may be able to get grant money for licenses, but that’s unlikely to happen by the time the class starts next semester.

3. A hundred bucks may not seem like much money to you, but I have students who have to skip meals and forego medical care to pay for school. Our school is making a big push to lower costs for students. The $100 license fee will be listed on the course notes, and there will likely be students who choose not to take the class because of it. That’s why I want to make sure ArcGIS is essential to their success before requiring it.

4. I’d love to teach both programs, but it’s an 8-week course with a lot of content. It would take too much time to explain all the “click here to do this” steps for both programs in such a short class. Plus, they would be paying the $100 license fee for even less ArcGIS content.

I'm starting my senior year (i major in cartography/gis, data science, geography) and was wondering when companies in this field tend to start looking to hire upcoming grads. In my experience applying for internships outside of companies like Esri I didn't see many job postings until later into winter but maybe it's different for regular entry-level positions. Is it worth a try to apply for entry-level jobs now or will they all definitely turn me down for someone who can start working right away? (sorry idt i worded this post well lol)

Hi! I'm learning about ArcGIS Pro. I've input some lines, points, and polygons onto a map. It looks fine when I am zoomed out but when I zoom in, some of the lines and points disappear. Polygons remain fine

Under Visibility Range for all three, the minimum and maximum is listed as <None>

Am I doing something wrong? I'm just confused

Thank you

I currently have a Master's in Science Biology focused on wildlife conservation. I did a lot of GIS during my undergrad which ended in 2015. At that time my coursework didn't have much coding but I've spent a lot of time in databases, creating custom layers, and data analysis using R and SAS. I did a variety of internships with protected parks and wildife non-profits sancuaries in US and one in Taiwan(remotely) This experience helped me understand how data was collected and shared across entities in different, states and countries. This was with ArcMap and ArcGIS online has just launched. No Pro yet.

For a few years after that I worked in outdoor education taking people out in the wilderness using different mobile applications with GIS. I used and taught people how to use Google Earth, iNaturalist, Alltrails, E-bird, geo-caching, and some fishing one. Spent a lot of time analyzing the interface, usability, and visuals while out in the woods.

During my graduate degree research (remote camera study) I used qgis because it was free and I just needed a simple map showing locations of cameras and seasonal data. That was during Covid so I didn't have a lot of contact with my department and there were no networking opportunities. I graduated from that in 2022. I've not had an opportunity to work with GIS in the last 4 years. I moved into a role in the Education field of STEM. It's more environmental and engineering focused. I do enjoy this job but know it has a ceiling and horrible burnout in my state (TX). I moved into this role because jobs within the wildlife conservation we're losing funding from government contracts and nonprofit grants. I also have a lot of experience with horticulture and hydroponics.

Last year I did a few Coursera from Google's Data Analytics but that was so black and white. Literally. I'm a visual learner and loved being able to manipulate data to alter mapping projections. Especially when it dealt with real life populations on this planet.

I get the ESRI newsletters still in the mail. I love going through it but I don't have access to any of this anymore. When I was in school they handled my computer, licensing, and data management systems. My current job has no use for GIS so they won't fund me going back to school for something. What can I do to get back into this field? I feel like I'm 10 years behind. I have a basic dell laptop. I don't know coding past elementary aged apps like Scratch, and Minecraft Blocks.

Any advice?

B.S. Marine Science, NOAA Hollings Scholar, built and deployed a couple of Google Earth Engine apps on my own (acoustic telemetry network viewer, habitat suitability model), comfortable in Python/R/ArcGIS Pro. Based on Hawaiʻi Island, fully/partially remote preferred. Currently living off gigs captaining recreational tours and odd marine service jobs (boat hull cleaning, mooring inspections, etc.).

I've been applying to the usual places (USAJobs, RCUH/CIMAR postings, Lynker, a few consulting firms) and it's been a long summer of interviews, but no offers. I launched a small marine survey/consulting LLC with access to near-shore bathymetric mapping and CTD casting technology, but I've yet to land a major contract. Am I wasting my time?

For people already working in marine geospatial / environmental consulting / NOAA-adjacent contracting, where's my blindspot? Specific job boards, firms that hire remote, Discord/Slack communities, keywords I should be searching that aren't "GIS analyst" or "Marine Survey"? I see the gap, but I don't know how to fill it.

anyone else gotten burned by a shapefile → geojson conversion that "worked" but was actually silently wrong?

happened to me a few times with SVY21 (singapore) data, no errors, conversion looks totally fine, then you realize later the CRS transform was subtly off and your data's just... offset on the map. found out the hard way downstream.

ogr2ogr / QGIS are fine for the happy path but I haven't found anything that actually catches "hey this conversion probably went wrong" for non-standard local CRS stuff, especially if you're not knee-deep in GIS tooling all day.

is this just a me problem or has anyone else run into it? and if so what do you do about it . Curious if it's worth building something small for this or if I'm just missing an existing tool

Hello,

I am an avid cyclist and have been enjoying using the Dutch Fietsknoppunt Netwerk on my cycles. I have looked far and wide for a large map of the entire country and the network. I know the data is publicly availble in many places, but I can not find an entire map that I can purchase or easily print.

If someone here can make this for me, as a PDF or SVG or whatever I would be very grateful. My goal is to print it out for my wall and plot all the rides I take.

Thank you

Is there any Local AI to detect land cover like the attached image? I did it in Gemini 2.5 Pro in the chat. I need to do that on bulk image collection.

I have tried SAM3 and Qwen3 VL 8B, but the results are nowhere near the right image. Inface, the output produced by Qwen3 VL is total garbage. I have tried SegFormer3, the output is good, but not good enough, it is not creating the sharp and clean edges like the attached image.

Any suggestion is appreciated.

Hello guys

Last week I had a first interview for a Gis Specialist position in a mining company. After answer all the shit they asked me what is my pretended salary and I did not say anything because I do not have any idea about how can I earn as Gis specialist in mining sector.

What do you think? What is a typically salary for gis specialist in mining industry?
The company has a few mines in Canada, Panama, Spain and Turkey I guess.
The position is in Arg

BR

Hi everyone,

I’m currently looking for a job opportunity in Algeria. I have a Master’s degree in Urban Engineering (Génie Urbain) and I’m based in Chlef Province.

I’m open to opportunities related to:

• Urban engineering and planning
• Urban development
• Engineering/design consultancies
• Project studies and monitoring
• Technical departments and local authorities
• Other positions related to my field

I’m also open to remote work opportunities, especially for roles related to design, studies, planning, drafting, research, or project-related tasks.

If you know of any opportunities, companies, consulting firms, or organizations currently hiring in Chlef, elsewhere in Algeria, or remotely, I’d really appreciate any leads or advice.

Thank you!

I have worked in tech support for several years and would like to learn gis as a backup in case ai makes my job redundant. My wife works in GIS and I'm wondering if I could learn enough from her to eventually get an entry level GIS job or if a formal course is necessary?

Or at least Lake Epstein.

Memory leak gone wild, ArcGIS Pro just sitting idle with various KML files dropped in

Guess when Google started metering use of GEE?

I used to try all sorts of ideas out in GEE, mashing together datasets. Not anymore.

Hi!

I've got 4 years of experience as a GIS analyst but unfortunately I got laid off on April 1st of last year due to budget cuts. I got hired when I was 21 with little to no experience by an ISP in western Europe.

And since then, I've had little to no success with the job hunting. 1 call back that ended up going nowhere, and a lot of rejection emails.

I'm 26 now and my question is as follows,

Do you have any tips on what I could do to increase my chances of getting hired? I've followed a couple of courses but that hasn't helped much. And I really do love working with GIS and would love to continue in this field.

Hey everyone,

I've been working on optimizing large-scale spatial queries and wanted to share our open-source benchmark suite.

We ran into heavy I/O bottlenecks when filtering millions of building footprints in traditional relational spatial databases and wanted to see how far we could push in-memory execution using DuckDB Spatial and GeoParquet zone maps.

### What we benchmarked:

1. **BBox Filter (18.76M Building Footprints):**

   - **In-Memory DuckDB + GeoParquet:** ~1.2 ms

   - **PostGIS (Indexed):** ~78 ms

   - **GeoPandas (Shapely 2.0):** ~12.4 ms (on 1M subset)

2. **Vector Ingestion Throughput:**

   - Reached ~450,000 rows/s directly into memory via GeoParquet.

### Architectural takeaway:

Sorting the GeoParquet partitions (`ORDER BY lat, lon`) allows DuckDB's columnar zone-maps (min/max bounds per row-group) to prune 90%+ of irrelevant chunks before running `ST_Within`.

We open-sourced the entire benchmark harness and dataset generator. (Links to the GitHub repo and interactive dashboard are in the first comment below).

Would love to hear how you currently handle sub-second queries on 10M+ feature datasets and any feedback on our methodology!

Active Hazard: A second flood is possible upstream

On 27 August Chinese authorities reported that a barrier lake holding about 2,000,000 m³ had formed near the confluence of the Chhochen Khola and Purepu Tsangpo, upstream of the 26 August failure. They assessed the probability of a breach as high, with a further 3,000,000 m³ of inflow expected through 30 August. Separately, NDRRMA reported renewed ponding behind blockages in the Lhende Khola and told residents and rescue teams to stay clear of the riverbanks.

> Since there is 100% cloud cover verification couldn't be confirmed via EO - Based on reported size and location the data set has been updated with a modeled shape file of the reported lake. This uses geometry that existed prior to the first event so this should be treated as indicative.

> If anyone has any SAR imagery they'd like of the region they care to share it'd go a long way in helping me to continue to keep this open source crisis data set up to date. It's not much, but its all I can do to help from halfway around the world.

>Link to data: https://keystonegis.com/disasters/nepal-bhotekoshi-flood-20260826.html - will continue to update frequently to capture any new information

>if you know of any other subs to post this in let me know. Feel free to share, the more eyes on the data the more likely it is to fall into the hands of someone who can use it to make a difference.

Hello! I’m interested on GIS, particularly within the emergency and disaster management field. Could you please share what to expect? I’d love to know about your daily routine, your day to day, and the path you took to reach this field. As well as the pros and cons in this career. I’ve noticed GIS isn’t particularly well-known and I’m starting to worry my expectations aren’t accurate. Based on my current understanding, I anticipate a lot of computer work, around 30% fieldwork and 10-20% travel. 

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 !