Community features

Community features

Finding hidden ship tracks

NASA are using machine learning to detect particles emitted from ships as they work their way across the oceans. They do this using data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on their Aqua satellite. It’s even possible to detect the ships at

Community features

kepler.gl (3D maps) for Jupyter

Uber have integrated their kepler.gl 3D spatial visualisation library into Jupyter Notebook. It’s now possible to plot complex maps directly inside a notebook by using Python as you would normally. I’m excited to see what sorts of things people create using

Community features

Delaunator v4

Vladimir Agafonkin (creator of Leaflet) has released v4 of Delaunator. It’s a super-fast library for Delaunay triangulation and the latest update improves performance by up to 10%. His other libraries are worth checking out as he’s obsessed with making them as fast

Community features

earthpy released

Earth Lab at the University of Colorado have released earthpy, a Python package to support working with spatial data. It can be used for both raster and vector data and can do things like creating hillshades and other types of analysis. earthlab/earthpyA package

Community features

TravelTime releases isochrone plugin for QGIS

It’s now possible to create isochrone visualisations in QGIS using a new plugin by TravelTime. The plugin supports multiple modes of transport and is free to use for the first 5,000 requests per month. Blog | TravelTime platform releases isochrone QGIS pluginCreate a

Community features

Colouring London

The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) has released their Colouring London project, which attempts to use crowd-sourcing to collect information on every building in London. So far the collected area is small, though this will likely change as more people get involved.

Community features

Storms in 3D using precipitation radar data

I’m a sucker for 3D spatial visualisations and this one of Super Typhoon Nepartak by Craig Taylor is no exception. He’s taken NASA precipitation radar data and used reflectivity values to define both colour and intensity of the 3D points. I spent

Community features

Visualisation of LINZ elevation data using Blender

Andrew Tyrrell has used LINZ LIDAR data to create a crisp map with detailed shadows where the elevation changes. If you’re interested in this effect then check out the go-to tutorial on the technique by Daniel Huffman. Playing#wip #b3d #cartography @LINZLDS pic.

Community features

Historic sea ice extents

This hypnotic map by John Nelson shows the seasonal ebb and flow of sea ice as it freezes and thaws over the past 40 years. He also looks at alternative methods of visualising the same data to explore how sea-ice extents have changed in

Community features

Raluca Nicola

If you’re into 3D maps or Web-mapping in general then you need to be following Raluca Nicola. She works on the ArcGIS API for JavaScript and outputs a constant stream of amazing 3D visualisations. I also featured some of her work in the

Community features

Slides and videos from the NOAA 2019 Geospatial Summit

A large number of slides and videos have been released from this year’s NOAA Geospatial Summit, primarily focused on geodesy and related fields. 2019 Geospatial Summit | National Geodetic Survey

Community features

Transitland

If you work with transit data you may be aware of GTFS. This format allows transit authorities to share structured information about their networks and vehicles in a common format. Transitland makes finding and extracting data from those feeds a breeze. TransitlandA community-edited data

Community features

UK places, buildings and constituencies

Alasdair Rae has compiled and shared a variety of data related to the UK, including places, buildings and constituencies. A reminder of some data I've shared - 42,000 places of Great Britain (shp, geojson, gpkg) https://t.co/k9uY3105xv - Buildings

Community features

High-res data updates to Living Atlas World Elevation Layers

Esri have updated their terrain layers with much higher resolution data, making a huge difference in some parts of the world. High resolution data updates to Living Atlas World Elevation Layers (June 2019)Rajinder NagiArcGIS Blog

Community features

Magnetic north continues its march to the east

An insightful article from Ordnance Survey on the difference between grid north (vertical lines on an OS map) and magnetic north (where a compass points). This difference is constantly moving due to fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. Magnetic north continues its march

Community features

Real-time route optimisation with Location Intelligence

This article from Carto looks into the issue of efficient routing for on-demand services that don’t have the luxury of delaying deliveries until the following day. It’s very detailed and looks into the algorithms that are required for achieving this. On-demand last

Community features

How our GIS team moved to open source systems

It’s great to see that the Registers of Scotland managed to escape from proprietary mapping platforms. To achieve this they undertook training in QGIS and PostGIS and spent a large amount of time re-writing Python scripts to move away from modules like arcpy.

Community features

Vintage shaded relief in Photoshop

I featured this map from Carl Churchill last week and challenged him to write a tutorial for it. Just a few days later he got back to me with a link to his first ever tutorial. Amazing! Vintage Shaded Relief in Photoshop

Community features

You can use FME Desktop for free for personal use

Did you know that you can use FME for free for non-commercial and non-production purposes? I didn’t! This was exciting news for me as I’ve been wanting to check out FME for some time now. Free Home Use License of FME Desktop

Community features

Cesium ion SketchUp extension for publishing models as 3D Tiles

If you want to bring custom 3D models into Cesium then you might be interested in a new plugin for exporting models into the 3D Tiles format. Publish 3D Tiles from SketchUp with the new Cesium ion Extension | cesium.comWe are happy to announce

Community features

QGIS 3.8

I may not use ArcGIS Pro, but I do use QGIS. The latest 3.8 update is out now and brings a range of new features and changes. I’m quite interested in the hash-line symbols and the expression filter updates, as well as

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ArcGIS Pro 2.4

I’ll be honest, I don’t use ArcGIS Pro (yet — I’m considering a personal licence to check it out) but I’ve always been impressed by what people are creating using it. The 2.4 update brings loads of changes, too many

Community features

New map of Greenland reveals fast-changing environment

Mapping the Arctic region is challenging due to the ever-changing coastline caused by glaciers and retreating ice sheets. Over the past 2 years Laura Gerrish has been working on collecting up-to-date data to produce this incredibly detailed map for the British Antarctic Survey. New

Community features

Watercolour map

Wes Jones has produced an amazing watercolour map for the Esri basemap collection. What’s even more impressive about this is that, aside from the watercolour textures, the basemap is vector. He even took watercolour classes to be able to create this. That’s

Community features

IFSAR-derived image of the Yukon River in Alaska

You may have seen Daniel Coe’s stunning LIDAR river visualisations before. If you haven’t, then you’re in for a treat! He regularly posts similar images so I recommend having a dig through his Twitter feed. Lovely stuff! #IFSAR-derived image of the