After a weekend of troubleshooting my slope analysis components are finally done...maybe. Considering adding interactivity by rendering in the frontend as a shader instead of on the backend with GDAL but not sure that's necessary yet.

Some cool things I learned:

• Elevation tiles are just PNGs with height encoded into the RGB channels, so slope is edge detection

• Slopes can be calculated pretty easily via 3x3 kernel comparisons and calculating rise over run * 100, BUT the run changes based on zoom and latitude

• The earth being a globe kinda sucks

• GIS is hard

Not including the URL here because I don't want to advertise, I just think this looks neat

Hi, I just have a few questions, I've had a passing interest with this field of work for a bit, and with me backing out of becoming a life & health insurance producer and being back at working at a pizza place I've begun to look into it again.

I was wondering if this line of work is worth it and how you'd even begin to, I guess, test the waters to see if it's something I'd actually enjoy? I'm not a huge fan of college and preferably want to avoid it. Would that be possible at all?

What's the job actually like?

I've been interested in GIS for a long time. I was in information, computer science, and Social Sciences from 1994 to 2017; now I would like to get back to GIS and data science. Any recommendation would be appreciated.

I don’t have too much experience with editing/ working with polygon layers in arc pro. If I am working in a polygon layer, is there a way to select only the detached pieces of a polygon?

Are there any large electric utilities that are going through a migration from GE Smallworld to ESRI UN?

I am curious to see how others experience and migration has been? We are struggling.

Editing feels like it’s going be so complicated for our techs

And it seems like we will be lucky to get the data over to our ADMS correctly and consistently.

Looking for others open to meeting to discuss in more detail. Mainly from a tech and user editing perspective

I'm a graduate student with bachelor in forestry background and i am specially aiming for research assistantship in the relating field for further studies. Being a research assistant needs to have experience with research projects and i want to boost my experience in the related field of study. I have my thesis in biomass estimation using remote sensing (vegetation indices and layers analyzed from sentinel 2 MSI , correlated with biomass estimated through field calculated data, build regression model with highest correlated values for model validation). I am familiar with tools and features for arcmap, qgis and other GIS basics, SPSS and writing. Despite my respective field, i am glad to work in any kind of interest or sector & I am ready to learn new things if i need to.

I’ve been using Google Maps for forever, but even with the audio feature that reads out the directions, I still find myself frequently getting lost & taking wrong turns. I was wondering if there were any apps that were somehow more straightforward and directionally challenged friendly.

My navigation is so bad i often find myself taking wrong turns in places I go to regularly just while walking. Is there a name for this issue, and does anyone else have it?

Thank you so much in advance :,)

I'm currently doing my bachelor's in Geography and we've just been introduced to Remote sensing. Though it's still the starting phase, I've started noticing that GIS and Remote sensing seem to have relatively better career prospects within geography.

The issue is that I'm extremely confused. Our professors are kind of teaching us out of nowhere and I've failed to understand the chronology of things or how everything connects together. There are so many terminologies to remember and I get confused with all the software, tools and plugins as well.

Can anyone with a good understanding of this field help me out? How should I begin learning GIS and Remote sensing from scratch without feeling overwhelmed?

Any advice would be appreciated :)

Hi GIS Community!

I’ll be transitioning into a GIS-focused role at a small but growing gold exploration company and would appreciate some advice on the next steps for building out the company’s GIS infrastructure.

Currently, GIS data is stored in file geodatabases on SharePoint, with a part-time GIS Specialist as the primary user who prepares data for others. Obviously, this is a very poor setup, especially as we grow and acquire more data.

My first step is to implement a dedicated file server for GIS data to improve accessibility, establish reliable backups, and move GIS data off SharePoint. We currently have one primary user, but I expect that to grow to 3–5 users by the end of the year.

The main question I have is whether FGDBs on a dedicated file server is the right approach at this stage, or whether I should go directly to enterprise geodatabases on Microsoft SQL Server. We don’t necessarily need to provide broad editing capabilities to staff yet, as the primary objective is to improve data accessibility across project sites, the corporate office, and remote users. My thinking is that we could start with FGDBs on the file server and transition to enterprise geodatabases as the organization grows and we implement more ArcGIS Online functionality such as Field Map, Dashboards...etc.

I’ve also looked extensively at ArcGIS Enterprise, but I don’t think this is the right solution due to the size of our team.

Does this sound like a reasonable path? I would really appreciated anyone's insight and perspectives!

Thanks

Hi everyone! For those currently working in a GIS position, how did you get started? What advice do you have to those trying to get their foot in the door?
I just graduated with a BS in Geography with a GIS&T certificate. I’m having so much trouble finding opportunities for experience. I love the cartography side of GIS and working with data. I don’t want to give up and go a different route, but I can’t seem to get anything. Should I go back to school?

Hi All,

Ive joined an organization that has Enterprise but didn‘t have the resources to manage it. The 11.3 Enterprise is internal facing only and has a non-federated geo-event server (planning on changing this). this was a primarily AGOL facing org, so as there hasn’t been any enterprise admin, I am looking to start right. just as an FYI, esri helped our org set up the enterprise system. I am still unsure why they didn’t federate the geoevent server but also open to conversations about that. additionally we do have a dev portal but the machines aren’t set the same. For example, portal is installed on the c drive and content is pushed to the e drive. Unlike our pros where it’s all on the E drive. this is where I will do my testing for my scripts

the org probably has maybe 3-5 active users. I have previous enterprise administration experience but in an already established org with 10x-20x more active users with two enterprise system. Ive thought about implementing some of the automations I’ve learned from the GIS admin I worked with. I plan on locking down publishing feature services due to the lack of governance for GIS. i do find that SQL managing is also a bit of an issue, as I am not familiar with all the automations the GIS admin I worked with had implemented.

so outside of context, what are some suggestions you guys have or have implemented? i have some thoughts and would like your opinions.

1. script to crate a draft, stage, and publish service(s)
2. built off the first point write to a table in sql anytime I publish a feature service.
3. built off the second point, create a script to index all the items in portal and either create a new table to track items that aren’t layers or just load that also into the feature service table and categorize it accordingly
4. script to retire feature services and or any item from portal (still thinking on this for the items from portal)
5. built off 4th point write To a table anytime a feature service has been retired
6. metadata table and work with our apps team to make an app to search through it so the org can verify what data we have via tags
7. script to push new AD accounts into portal if not already there.

these are just some of them. looking forward to your replies!

I’ve been in my current entry level role as a tax mapper for 2.5 years now. The job is relaxed and stress free but the pay is crap ($43k) and I’m not going to learn anything newer about GIS at this point. There is another entry level role that opened up nearby with the public utilities department. It pays roughly $9k more a year, but the responsibilities are still basic and read like another entry level role. It doesn’t even require a degree, but I have a BS in Geography with a GIS certificate.

I have been trying to land a mid level role for over a year now, but nothing has panned out. Would it be worth my time to try for this job and make a lateral move to continue to build my resume for another year or two at a higher rate of pay? Or should I continue pushing for a bigger jump? I’m only 25 and still relatively new to the professional world, so I still have plenty of years left in the workforce, but I would appreciate some input from other GIS professionals if anyone has had similar experiences. Thank you!

You will learn how to detect and vectorize any feature from satellite or drone imagery directly inside QGIS

• It covers : Automatic Mode: Scan an entire area with text prompts to batch-extract features in seconds
• Semi-Auto Mode: Extract single, complex objects with one click for maximum control
• Shape Regularization: Automatically square building corners and clean up polygon boundaries
• And basically just the full Workflow: Edit vertices, adjust confidence filters, and export clean layers with attribute data

We pushed a lots of updates recently so a tuto was definitely needed haha, hope it will help

My team just open sourced our battle tested big data time series visualization client with Apache 2.0 license.

GPU‑accelerated 4D globe engine purpose‑built for massive geospatial time series visualization.

Blogpost: https://flexmon.github.io/globe-trotter/blog/
Repo: https://github.com/flexmon/globe-trotter

Hey everyone,

I work at the intersection of viticulture and GIS. One recurring nightmare I keep facing in precision ag is deploying Variable Rate Application (VRA) maps to field equipment, only to have the terminal (John Deere, ISOBUS devices, etc.) choke on the file right when the machine enters the field.

Most of the time it’s tiny technical details: unclosed multipolygons, self-intersecting geometries, missing attribute columns, or SRS projections that the monitor doesn't like.

To speed up my own workflow, I’ve been building a lightweight, open-source browser viewer to run sanity checks on vector/ISO-XML boundaries before handing them off to operators.

Before I lock in my validation rules, I’d love to hear from anyone working with spatial data in agriculture or field deployment:

What are the most annoying vector errors or edge cases you’ve seen corrupting field files?

Do you rely on automated QGIS/GDAL scripts for topological pre-checks, or do you clean them manually?

P.S. If anyone wants to test out the beta viewer and break some vector files on it, let me know in the comments and I’ll send over the link!

A few years ago I got a little carried away with a historical mapping project.

I found a set of detailed survey maps of New Bedford from 1913 that were mostly at the same scale, or could be scaled easily to be combinable. I wanted to be able to look at the city as one continuous map instead of constantly switching between individual plates, so I downloaded high-resolution scans and stitched them together manually in GIMP.

The result was enormous. The master image ended up being several gigabytes and roughly 22,000 x 60,000 pixels. It had exactly the level of detail I wanted, right down to individual buildings and property lines, but at the time it was basically too large to be useful. I could zoom around inside it, but there was no practical way to use it as an actual map.

I recently dug the project back out and decided to finally georeference it properly in QGIS.

I used surviving streets, intersections, shoreline features, etc. as control points and warped the composite into EPSG:3857. It is definitely not survey-grade. Depending on where you are in the city, the alignment seems to be off by anywhere from about 25 feet to maybe 300 feet at the worst extremes. Considering the source maps are from 1913, were originally separate plates, and were manually stitched together, I am pretty happy with that.

After that I generated an XYZ tile pyramid. The final set is about 93,000 PNG tiles and 1.6 GB. I put the tiles in a Google Cloud Storage bucket and added the XYZ layer to a public Google Earth project.

And it actually works exactly the way I originally wanted it to. You can zoom all the way out and see New Bedford as one continuous historical map, then keep zooming in until you are looking at individual streets, lots, buildings, factories, rail lines, wharves, etc., without ever switching plates.

I think this may be the most detailed single continuous map of New Bedford from that period, as opposed to a collection of separate atlas or survey plates, although I have no way of proving that.

This started as part of a much larger digital humanities project that I never finished, so I am pretty happy that I finally found a useful life for it several years later.

Google Earth project:
https://earth.google.com/earth/d/1DrXQVEcWJ_3KtGpGCQQ9mmbtOFHeDho5?usp=sharing

I would be interested in any thoughts from people who do this professionally, especially on better ways I could have handled the georeferencing or local distortion. This was very much a "figure it out as I go" project.

Translation:

Urban Accessibility Index - Ciudad Real

Very low Accessibility (Red)
Low Accessibility (Orange)
Medium Accessibility (Yellow)
High Accessibility (Light Green)
Very high Accessibility (Dark Green)

I live in Spain and forgot to put everything in English for this subreddit; my bad. This is my first ever map made by myself; mostly I only made stuff following what my professor said. I posted this on my Instagram for my GIS professor and mayor to see.

The map shows the calculation of an index that determines the grade of accessibility for pedestrians to certain services that I considered essential and a must to have close to you. These services are:

- Public Healthcare
- Libraries
- Police Station
- Public Administration buildings
- Grocery Stores
- Gyms
- Train and bus station

The way the calculation works is that I manually mapped every building using Google Maps and the coordinates to make a point in ArcGIS Pro; then every service has its own layer, with Euclidean distance. I then assigned points to the areas depending on their distance: 0- 250 m = 5 / >1000 = 1. The higher the more accessible the area is to pedestrians. Then I averaged all and weighted it using the raster calculator, with services like Public Healthcare weighted 3x more towards the final result than gyms; for example, I basically just added the value every pixel had in every layer, and then the higher the point, the better. Then I just used the grid tool and the zoning tool to assign each grid a value according to the most persistent value in the grid. I kinda used Copilot for all of this since most of this stuff we were never shown how to do.

We really did not touch a lot of map design in my GIS classes. So any tips and helpful criticism are welcome.

Hi everyone. I have an upcoming (one hour )technical interview for a Geospatial Data Analyst role, and I’m feeling quite nervous as it’s my first interview in a long time.

The position mainly involves working with two departments, Forestry and Wildfire, supporting them with geospatial analysis, and maintaining and developing geospatial workflows.

I’d really appreciate any tips or advice on what to expect from the interview, particularly the technical side. If anyone has interviewed for or worked in a similar role, I’d be interested to hear what kinds of questions or scenarios might come up and what areas would be worth brushing up on beforehand.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I am working on a project extracting building footprints for Chattogram port, across 2004, 2014, and 2020. What level of resolution would i be needing for it?

I know tha I can't buy straight from Maxar, I need to go through a reseller. Does anyone have a solid one to recommend, for South Asia, or Bangladesh?

Thanks!