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| June 30 · Issue #3 · View online |
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Welcome to the third issue of Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spatial community. Each issue I’ll highlight the most interesting and inspiring things that I’ve found — cool demos, new tools, tutorials, beautiful maps, interviews, behind-the-scenes and more.
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How are we already on the third issue?! In a way it feels like time has flown by since the first issue, and in another it feels like so much has happened since then. You can find the previous issues here if you’ve not read them yet. Creating this newsletter has quickly become a big part of my life and I’m loving every minute of it. I never dreamed of growing a community this large, especially in such a short space of time. You’ve helped open my eyes to all sorts of new and amazing spatial content, which I’m able to then pass on to everyone else through the newsletter. That’s the great thing about this — we all benefit from getting involved. I’d also like to say thank you for sharing the newsletter as we’re now up to 875 subscribers, in less than a month! 🤯 All I ask from you is that if you enjoy this issue then please share it with your friends and colleagues. With your help we might even reach 1,000 before the next one! So as always, sit back and join me on this periodic journey through the world of maps. And remember, you can unsubscribe at any point if you’re not finding this useful. One last thing — you can reply directly to me via this email if you have content suggestions, questions, or just want to say hi. Lots of you have done this so far. Don’t be shy! 👋
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Hurricane inundation zone map
This beautiful map by Fabien Lezeau shows the areas that would be affected by varying categories of hurricanes. The LIDAR-based relief adds an extra element of detail and context to the map. Created using QGIS and Blender. |
The age of Arctic sea ice
Showing the age of Arctic sea ice, this map highlights how much of the oldest sea ice has been lost since the 1980s. The article itself is a fascinating read into a daring expedition where a group of scientists are freezing their ship in the sea ice and letting it carry them for a year.
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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! |
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 dedication!
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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. |
Have you made an interesting map recently? I’d like to highlight more maps from the subscriber community. Don’t be shy! Either reply to this email or contact me on Twitter. |
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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 to list here. There are some nice visualisation improvements like more realistic effects, as shown off by Elliot Hartley in the image above. |
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 generating XYZ tiles in MBTiles format.
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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.
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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.
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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! |
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. This is something I’ve seen happening in a lot of places now.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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UK places, buildings and constituencies
Alasdair Rae has compiled and shared a variety of data related to the UK, including places, buildings and constituencies.
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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.
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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.
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ESA Space App Camp 2019
The European Space Agency (ESA) has opened applications for its 2019 Space App Camp. The concept is to produce useful applications using the large amount of Earth observation data collected by ESA satellites.
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GEO Individual Excellence Award
The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) are accepting submissions for their Individual Excellence Award, open to anyone who has “demonstrated exceptional personal commitment to the GEO Mission and whose work has had tangible impact.”
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FIG Foundation Grant for the FIG Young Surveyors European Meeting (Porto, October 11 & 12th)
Are you a young surveyor? Or know someone who is? There’s a fully-paid grant going to attend the FIG Young Surveyors European Meeting in Portugal this October. The grant covers travel, accommodation and registration.
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If you know of any roles that are related to the spatial industry then let me know so I can include them in a future issue.
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Remote Sensing — University of Wisconsin-Madison (postdoc)
Two postdoc researchers are required for the NASA-funded Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment.
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Lectureships in Geography (4 Positions) — Bristol University
The School of Geographical Sciences at Bristol University are looking to fill four openings for Lectureships in Geography.
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Geospatial Developer roles (2 positions) — Bayer Crop Sciences
Bayer Crop Sciences are looking for a Geospatial Developer and Geospatial Engineer to join their team. You’d be working on areas such as Web-mapping and processing of spatial datasets.
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Raluca Nicola (@nicolaraluk)
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 first issue of Spatial Awareness. 👌 |
Who inspires you from the community? I can only highlight the people that I’m aware of, so get in touch if you have someone you admire in the community who deserves some recognition. You can reply to this email or contact me on Twitter. |
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Can you help the OpenStreetMap Operations Working Group?
The OSM Operations Working Group is a volunteer group, responsible for maintaining the servers used by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. They are looking for someone who can give 1—3 hours per week to help with analysing their server infrastructure, making plans, forecasting future hardware needs and drawing up budgets.
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Why your community should host State of the Map
Would you like to host the annual OSM State of the Map event in your city? Do you have the means to do so? You have until the end of August to submit a proposal for next year’s event.
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I’ve set up a Slack chat for the Spatial Awareness community to talk maps and help shape future issues of the newsletter. Please join if you’d like to be part of that community and have a direct channel of communication with me. I’ll also be sharing early access to issues with a select group who are happy to help me proofread and generally double-check things. We’ve already got a large group of people signed up with a wide variety of expertise. You can join here — I’m looking forward to seeing you! |
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And with that we round up another week jam-packed with spatial goodies. I’m already excited about the next issue! So what do you think? What did you like? What didn’t you like? Don’t forget to reply to this email if you have any feedback, suggestions for content or just want to say hi. You can also reach me on Twitter, where I’m usually posting all sorts of interesting spatial-related stuff. See you in the next one.
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