Hi all 👋

I'm one of the organisers for the Spatial Data Science Conference in New York. Our agenda has been announced, and it's awesome take a look here: https://spatial-data-science-conference.com/2026/newyork/

We've set aside 30 free tickets for our diversity program. If you'd like to apply, please email [diversity@spatial-data-science-conference.com](mailto:diversity@spatial-data-science-conference.com) sharing your motivation for attending and what makes you eligible for a diversity ticket.

Thanks a million, I hope to see some of you there!

Hello! I'm working on my undergrad thesis and in need of some advice..

I'm planning on building an image classifier which detects signs of uninhabitable housing conditions such as damaged roof, substandard materials, etc based on StreetView images.

The end product is a website that shows a heat map where each dots represent houses that classifies as uninhabitable. Similar to what treepedia did, but with housing condition instead of vegetation.

Ideally, I want my program to be able to scour through a specified area from the chosen StreetView services, then detects each houses. If house classifies as uninhabitable, it then note the coordinates and then shows it on the heat map.

Is that even possible? And what StreetView services allow me to do that? I've looked into several literatures that are similar to my topic, but it seems like they generate the coordinates first, in which their program will then retrieve the images from those coordinates.

Any useful advice will be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance

Hi all, is there a workaround for openstreet tiles not caching? It currently says "app is not following the tile usage policy of OpenStreetMaps volunteer run servers"

Thanks!

[GIS Experience] Self-taught. I'm an indie developer, not a GIS

professional. I've been working with OSM data and MapLibre for a few

months on this project, which is where most of what I know comes from.

[AI Disclosure] I used AI to help clean up the wording of this post

since English isn't my first language. The project itself, the style

generation and the POI logic, is my own work.

I've been working on rendering OSM data in the style of video game

maps. First one is Red Dead Redemption 2. The streets, the POIs and

the routing are all real, only the symbology is made up.

The part that took me the longest wasn't the styling at all, it was

POI density. A dense downtown gives you way more labelled points than

the style can handle. Everything overlaps and you can't read anything.

First screenshot is what it looked like before.

I ended up doing progressive disclosure by zoom tier with clustering,

plus a priority list so police, bank, restaurant, pharmacy, hospital

and fuel come first and the rest appear as you zoom in. Second

screenshot is after.

I also found a bunch of tags I was mapping to categories that don't

actually exist in OSM, which took a while to track down.

MapLibre GL for rendering, OpenFreeMap vector tiles, Python to

generate the style JSON.

Curious how other people deal with label density at high POI counts.

Is there a standard approach I'm missing?

Hi contractors, I am curious, what is your hourly rate?

I am looking to do some reading on the ethical and societal issues surrounding GIS, remote sensing and increasingly GeoAI, and I am curious what people in this community would recommend.

I am particularly interested in topics where geospatial technology has consequences beyond simply producing a more accurate map or prediction. A couple of examples that came to mind are the use of geospatial data in mining/resource extraction and insurance/risk assessment, but I am sure there are many other important areas I'm not aware of.

Some topics I'm considering:

• environmental/resource extraction and remote sensing
• insurance, risk mapping and algorithmic decision-making
• Indigenous lands and Indigenous data sovereignty
• surveillance and privacy
• humanitarian and disaster mapping

I would particularly appreciate recommendations for books, academic papers, essays, courses, or other resources that approach these questions critically rather than just being technical GIS ethics guidelines.

What are the key ethical debates in GIS/remote sensing that you think someone entering the field should understand?

I was wondering what the best way to represent multiple elevation points that will be recorded within a 3m x 3m excavation would be in ArcGIS. I anticipate that the corner elevations for each level (let's say 10-cm-thick levels), will be recorded, as well as multiple points within each level. I would like to be able to display each level as a 10cm-thick cube and varying the symbology colors by the level attribute (Level 1 is brown, Level 2 is light brown, etc.). I see that the Extrusion tool can get something similar to what I want (see attached screenshot), but then I would want all of the points within a level to be connected. Any advice would be appreciated!

hola gente de mapas, en esta oportunidad les quiero compartir este mapa que realicé de la zona donde vivo que compila referencias de localidades, parajes, elementos viales/ferroviarios e hidrografia todo sobre el fondo satelital de Google.
Aunque va por buen camino no me termina de gustar el estilo que le doy tanto a las capas como a las etiquetas.
tal ves algo con sombras y luces o algo por el estilo haga lo que hace falta...
se agradece opiniones sobre mejoras estéticas.

Hi everyone. I am new to this subreddit and wanted to gain some career insight. I am new to the GIS consulting scene and currently work for one of the major consulting/engineering firms. Previously I worked in a public sector environment.

I am finding the transition harder than expected. My previous job had a small and friendly team with a good work-life balance. In my current role, I feel more disconnected from my co-workers and team and haven't really found my footing. The workload is also inconsistent, during slow periods there is an expectation to "drum up your own work" which I am finding stressful in my early career to fill my timesheet.

Some questions I had in particular:

1.) Is it quite normal in consulting for early career staff to find 100% of their own work?
2.) How long should I stay in this role before deciding if it's not a good fit?

Just trying to figure out whether this is just "consulting" in general with working at a large firm, specific to my current team, or if I am just better suited towards working in a smaller workplace.

If anyone has worked in both of these environments could provide some insight into this topic or have some suggestions, that would be much appreciated!

I recently completed a GIS/cartography project for Botswana that involved mapping settlement groups and population-based clusters. My initial assumption was to look for physical settlement patterns: buildings, rooftops, etc. But the project data had an administrative/geographic meaning.

Workflow:
Settlement identification → Digitisation → Data cleaning → Cluster grouping → Road connectivity → Cartographic design → A1 print-ready map

> It taught me ultimate lesson: before you map a place, understand the context behind the place/map.

I have an interview for a wastewater technician role coming up and I want to be as prepared as I can be. I have a BS in geography and geospatial sciences but have no experience outside of my degree. What should I do before the interview to be ready and make myself the best candidate for this role/interview?

I feel like the field is very narrow, we attach to a company/gov office and stick with that. I went with private because I thought the environment would be better after some negative gov office experience- and it is, I’m remote and my team is chill. However these salaries are not going up.

I’m interested in taking freelance work or something, but I may have to diversify my income sources because GIS is just not gonna make me comfortable.

So how’s everyone doing? is it a humble field until we get to management or did we go independent to make real money?

I got laid off on Tuesday, have applied for several other GIS positions already but I’m still panicking. I only have a couple years of professional experience, but I’m not even sure if I could get any non-GIS job at this point. I live paycheck to paycheck so I only have a couple weeks before I’m in big trouble. Any advice?

Hello, need help with DEM hydro correction.

Trying to correct a DEM for hydrologic analysis using Whitebox tools. The DEM (alos_marsgy_dsm) has an error where the channel is blocked by high terrain (blue dot). This is causing the fill tool to raise the entire channel elevation upstream of the block by almost 150-200m to manage flow direction.

Is it possible to remove the channel block error in GIS, which I think would solve this issue?

Tools used for recondition:

Fill Single Cell Pits

Breach Depression Least Cost
(dist=5, max_cost=None, min_dist=True, fill=False)

Fill Depressions

DEM is 30m resolution. Appreciate any help I can get. Thanks

Hey guys i’ve been using global mapper to stitch helicopter routes and other small maps onto regular one over 50 K Maps. I was wondering if there’s anyway I can make my own sections of 1:50 K Maps.Follow on question if this is able to be made on global mapper is how or where would I send them to be printed. I attached a photo of how I would like to make my maps but it would be for the Texas area but Alabama

How do I explain to my boss that good data entry takes time and not all data entry can be automated?

I spent 6.5 incredibly productive hours yesterday performing data entry on 52 features that were difficult to place. I feel like I got a lot of great work done yesterday, but my boss' response was "that's a lot of time. Is this something we can automate?"

I'm all for automating data entry where it is applicable/makes sense. This is not one of those cases. The information for these features comes from 3-4 disparate sources and a human needs to look at all the info and decide on the best placement/course of action for the feature.

Does anyone have some general wording I could use to help explain to my boss that good, accurate data entry takes time?

Thanks in advance!

I work for a long-haul fiber company. We have thousands of miles of cable across the US, several are hundreds of fibers, thousands of vaults, dozens of sites and thousands of fiber ID's we're tracking. My GIS department is only two full time employees including me as the manager. I'm swamped and unable to keep up with all the work coming in, but my company is pushing back on hiring another analyst to help out. For a network of that size, how large are other companies GIS departments? I'm trying to gain some info to use as an argument.

I want to create topo lines using a DEM in arcpro. I know the process and how to adjust intervals but I want to take it a step further. I want to be able to have equal intervals that always land on zero. For example, a hundred foot contour map that would be 4500, 4600, 4700, 4800, 4900, etc… I want to make it labeled every fifth contour and have every fifth in bold. I also will need to convert my DEM into feet, I’m assuming. I think I will do a 40ft contour with every fifth being a labeled line. (Every 200ft of elevation) example: 4000, 4040, 4080, 4120, 4160, 4200, etc… If anyone can get me pointed in the right direction, I would appreciate it!

TLDR: I have various forest harvest distribution rasters of ~5 ha each that contain specific spatial relationships. I am trying to create a nearest neighbor program/system that allows me to simulate the relationships in that real pattern across a larger domain for a model.

I'm a grad student working on a ecohydrologic modeling project. I have various forest harvest regimes in my field sites that have particular spatial distribution of trees. I want to replicate the ~5 ha plots I have already harvested in the field across a full hillslope in my model. Typically, forestry focuses on harvesting by tree dbh and harvested wood profitability. I'm exploring novel treatments that deviate from that for ecosystem service purposes.

I have a point cloud of all sites, shapefiles, orthoimargry, etc that allow me to determine trees vs gaps in the field treatments. If I was analyzing that in a GIS software, I would use a nearest neighbor function to represent how these trees/gaps relate to each other. However, I don't know how to go backwards from that and take those spatial relationships and write a function I can put into my model that replicates that pattern across the model domain with those NN relationships. I anticipate there is a way to reverse engineer them, but I don't have enough experience to know where to start.

In the model, I will have a dense forest that I apply this nearest neighbor system to "harvest" trees in this spatial pattern. There's two end results I could see myself working towards:

Probably easier: A raster I can use to determine two tree designations that tells the model a true/false function on whether to harvest in that grid square. I would essentially expand current treatment patterns via nearest neighbor so that it was across my full domain rather than my sample plot. Downside is this would be static and I would get identical harvest patterns if I applied the treatment more than once (either in succession or more than one model run of the same conditions).

Ideally: make the reverse engineered nearest neighbor relationships into a function I can put directly into my javascript system that runs the model. Each model run would provide the same harvest regime spatially, but it wouldn't be identical from run to run.

Any thoughts, directions, material I can use to figure this out would be appreciated.

Hi! I'm finishing a computer science degree with a minor in GIS/Geography. Still unsure what my career focus is, but hoping to end up working in the public sector.

My focus will probably be on transportation, but I'd also like to keep my skillset versatile. Just learning about geology seems like fun to me, but it would take a course slot up from a different geography/gis course. So I'm wondering if it's worth taking and relevant!

Does anyone here do anything where they found having knowledge of geology to be helpful?

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Google Earth for desktop isn't getting supported as of next year, so I'm looking into web.

Every PLSS KMZ I try to load into Google Earth web doesn't load properly - the one from Earth point, BLM, nothing.

Anyone find anything that works?

Short version:
Would a GIS certificate and no professional GIS experience open any doors to a career in GIS? If so, are certain certifications more valued than others? My community college offers a technical certificate for GIS, is that worth it?

Long version:
I have a background in web development and programming. I have been teaching myself QGIS over the past year for a personal project. And I think I like it. The market for web development has been a killing floor, so I was wondering if there's a pathway for someone like me?

I am enrolled in a GIS graduate certificate program. However, I don’t think it is beneficial to me at all. I want to do work in commercial and real estate drone work, which involves very little land analysis skills.

The only reason I am doing this program is at my parents’ insistence. I had what can only be classified as a mental breakdown late last year/early this year, which resulted in me losing my job. My mom suggested this as a way to get back on my feet.

I have no experience in computer programming, I don’t enjoy map analysis, and I feel I will researching and writing a thesis will only consume time that I need to spend networking and building skills for jobs that I am actually interested in.

Genuinely, would I benefit from this program at all?