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The future of OpenStreetMap

In this post, Sajjad Anwar from Development Seed takes a look at the future of OSM and how we’re going to get there. Key takeaways are more focus on verification, better utilisation of AI, and notification when the physical world changes and the

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QGIS 3.10 released

For the QGIS users out there, you’ll want to check out the latest 3.10 release. The update brings with it a huge amount of improvements; including changes to the labelling system, a logarithmic scale for graduated styles, tonnes of layout and print

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Panoply — NetCDF, HDF and GRIB viewer

I’ve been working with NetCDF data a lot over the past few weeks. Something that quickly becomes obvious with NetCDF is that, while powerful, it’s not the simplest data format to work with for creating visualisations. With this in mind, I was

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Rayshader v0.13.0 released

If you use R for spatial visualisation then you’re probably already aware of Rayshader. For those of you who haven’t heard of it before? Well, you’re in for a treat. In short, Rayshader is a framework for 2D and 3D data

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#30DayMapChallenge entries

And just like that, the #30DayMapChallenge is over! It’s been a pleasure witnessing all the amazing spatial visualisations that have been produced over the past month. So many people were involved and it’s been fascinating to see the wide range of approaches

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Aussie smoke plumes crossing oceans

This fantastic animated visualisation by Joshua Stevens shows black carbon being dispersed into the atmosphere as a result of fires across Australia. The data is from the GEOS forward processing (GEOS-FP) model, which regularly takes observed data and uses that to work out what

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Mini Tokyo 3D

I have a soft spot for 3D visualisations of public transport, I suppose because my first major spatial visualisation was the London Underground in 3D with animated trains in realtime.

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Open Infrastructure Map

Infrastructure is fascinating to me, especially when it requires taking a step back to comprehend the sheer scale and complexity of it. The Open Infrastructure Map by Russ Garrett is

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Sarah Bell

I’ve featured Sarah Bell a couple of times since this newsletter started, first for her great climbing map for the MonoCarto competition earlier in the year, and also within this issue for her tutorial on hand-drawn hillshade using pencils and paper. Sarah also

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#30DayMapChallenge

This week saw the start of Topi Tjukanov’s #30DayMapChallenge. The general idea is that for each day of November you create something with spatial data and share it with the wider community. The catch is that each day has a specific theme that

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Global historic tropical cyclone tracks

This fascinating dataset contains the track data for historic tropical cyclones worldwide, from way back in 1841 all the way to the present day. The dataset is updated weekly with the more recent data (later than 1980) being the most accurate, having come from

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Release of 2m DEM covering the entire Canadian Arctic

A new high-resolution DEM has been released that covers the entire Canadian Arctic. The new data has 2 metre resolution, compared to 5 metres previously. The data has been released as part of the ArcticDEM project. High-Resolution Digital Elevation Model (HRDEM) generated from LiDAR

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How assuming the Earth is “flat” helps speed up rendering in deck.gl

This in-depth article by Georgios Karnas takes a look at the issue of coordinate precision faced by Uber for Deck.gl, their 3D spatial visualisation library. Specifically, Georgios digs into the limitations of floating-point precision in WebGL shaders and details how they worked around

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Visualising Amsterdam’s heartbeat

Craig Taylor strikes again with a series of beautiful animated visualisations for TomTom as part of his work at Ito World. The visualisations look at GPS data across the city of Amsterdam and how it can be used to tell a compelling story. The

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Drawing colour hillshade by hand

It’s so easy to forget that digital isn’t the only way that spatial data can be produced and consumed. I’m guilty of this myself and it’s something I’m hoping to improve upon in the future, even if just printing

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qgis2web 3.10.0 adds exporting to Mapbox GL JS

If you’ve ever wanted to export maps from QGIS to the Web then you need to check out qgis2web by Tom Chadwin. This plugin has historically supported exporting your maps as Leaflet or OpenLayer maps, and has recently added support for exporting maps

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PostGIS 3.0.0 has been released

It’s finally here! The official release of PostGIS 3.0.0 has been announced, packed full of new features and performance improvements. This is a big update for anyone who use vector tiles, GeoJSON or want to benefit from the upgrade to PROJ

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Aerialod released by creator of MagicaVoxel

This could be my favourite spatial software release of the year — it’s certainly near the top of the list! What is it? It’s Aerialod by ephtracy, a lovely tool that takes elevation data and uses a path-tracing renderer to produce stunning 3D

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Why all world maps are wrong

This six-minute video from Vox takes a whimsical look at why flat maps are distorted and comparing that distortion between projections. It’s angled more towards people new to maps but its slick production value makes it interesting nonetheless.

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GeoTIFF v1.1 adopted as an OGC standard

It looks like being adopted by the OGC has opened the doors for various organisations to declare standard support for the GeoTIFF format, like NASA’s Earth Observation data. GeoTIFF v1.1 adopted as an OGC Standard | OGCOGC

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Autumn foliage colours across the United States

Arguably my favourite season of the year, Autumn can completely transform a landscape through the changing colours of leaves. This map by The Washington Post visualises the types of forests across the United States and the colours you might find there. I also like

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Mineral map style

This map by Madison Draper is a modern interpretation of a map from 1940. Aside from being visually impressive, what’s also interesting is that it doesn’t use political

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Australia shaded relief

It’s always a pleasure seeing one of David Garcia’s maps, and this one of Australia is no exception — I love his use of colour. You should check out

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Laura Gerrish

Laura Gerrish is a GIS and mapping specialist at the British Antarctic Survey, which has to be one of the cooler places to work (pun not intended). I’ve actually featured her in a previous issue, highlighting the fantastic Greenland map that she worked

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Videos from State of the Map US 2019

State of the Map US took place back in September and hosted a variety of talks related to the OpenStreetMap ecosystem. The videos of these talks have recently been released and can be found by clicking each talk title after following the link. State

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