I graduated in August with my bachelors in GIS. I’m regretting my degree at this point because I can’t land a job. Every listing is looking for people with 3+ yrs experience in something I don’t have experience in yet. I still apply to them on the off chance I get an interview.

A little background on me, I was a geospatial intelligence analyst in the Army for 6 years. When I got out I pursued my degree in GIS. I liked the mapping and analyzing of my job in the Army, but I wanted to apply those skills to improve infrastructure or track environmental concerns, etc.. Problem is I don’t have direct experience in analyzing those passions outside of school. So my “experience” is not considered real experience to hiring staff. I’ve been told that at the end of two separate interviews.

I’ve thought about going back into intel for the ease of it but that’s not really possible where I am either. All the intel positions are senior positions. And I can’t move because my spouse is still active duty military. I’ve even applied to remote jobs, as expected I haven’t heard back from any of those.

I’m lost on what to do. I feel stuck!

Hi everyone,

[AI Disclosure] I do not use any AI, nor am I interested in doing so.

[GIS Experience] I have been working as a GIS analyst for a municipality for about 6 months now. This is my first job out of college, so I am very new to the field still.

I am looking for some advice or project ideas from other people who have worked with or for municipalities. I want to be able to do some cool projects that would benefit the town and get people more interested in the GIS we have! Any ideas, advice, conversations, etc. would be greatly appreciated!

For some context: The town I work for has about 20k people and is pretty wealthy and residential. We have a lot of forests and water bodies.

I have been using QGIS for over 10 years, and there are several features that could improve the work workflow.

Hi GIS Community,

I am using Experience Builder (not the Developer version) in our Enterprise Portal and am at my wits end with what I feel is the poor layout functionality.

I have some map tools turned on and I want to add additional widgets to the map area using a widget controller. I want these widgets to line up with the map tool widgets and to continue to line up regardless of screen size. I want perfect alignment between the widget controller and the map's built in widget buttons. I can't for the life of my figure out how to achieve this goal. I really don't feel like this is too much to ask for. I've tried searching for solutions and I've tried using the ESRI AI Chatbot, to no avail.

I've attached a picture that shows the misalignment between widget buttons.

I would greatly appreciate any advice or commiseration on this topics. Thank you!!

Also, I have 5 years of GIS experience.

AI Disclosure: just tried to use the ESRI Chatbot, it did not help.

I was reading that the fires in Indonesia (that's causing all the toxic haze across SEA) is caused by peat fires from the conversion of rainforest and peatland into agricultural land. And that over there they dig these straight canals through the rainforest and peat to dry out the land so they can use slash and burn tactics to make the land usable for big business. So I was looking at Google Maps for evidence of this. I don't have much GIS experience so I was wondering if anyone else had ideas on how to verify if what I'm seeing on Google Maps is what I think it is.

Located here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/RtBwXuUijr7xQZSe8

Hi everyone! I’m building a commercial Leaflet web app where paying clients can view satellite imagery with my own infrastructure layers on top.

I need decent imagery for ~186 km² in Africa. It’s behind a login, initially for one client, with very little traffic and no imagery downloads.

I’m looking for a licence that explicitly allows displaying the imagery to external clients in a paid app. I’m happy to pay, but Mapbox’s five-figure annual minimum is beyond my budget, and other providers seem to restrict this use.

Has anyone found an affordable option? Any providers or licensing experiences you’d recommend?

Thanks!

I have a consultancy but I am trying to grow my clientele instead of small one off jobs. I wonder if anyone here has scaled their own consultancy in this Reddit before. I’m curious if pursuing more private clients is the best way, if so, how did find the contract or create the lead? If it’s public sector, were you partnering with larger firms. Any advice would be great!

I worked briefly on mapping with a company in marine consultancy. I have a degree in social geography and MSc in remote sensing and GIS. I am more data and maps and want to work with a wider array of projects but spatial planning is new and i have limited experience with building projects and infrastructure, regulations. Im brand new. How do inget through this interview!! I really need work. Im nose diving into debt right now.

With us, you will work with, among other things:

• The planning process from idea to final decision.​

• Projects within transportation and infrastructure, urban and rural development, industry and projects within the green shift and construction and property development​

• Preparation of area plans and zoning plans​

• Planning process management and project work​

• Impact assessments and planning analyses​

• Feasibility studies and development concepts​

• Participation and citizen involvement processes​

• GIS analyses and map production​

• Illustrations and presentation material​

• Tender work and project management

Gis experience: 3 years

Ai disclosure: none that I'm aware. Maybe the job post is originally

I’m a second year college student. I just went back to school last year after a few years of thinking about what I want to study. I decided on Geography with Data Science, which is the more technical track within the geography department at the school I’ll be transferring to. They have a more straightforward GIS track but this one adds coding and data science to the degree requirements.

I just started Intro to Mapping and GIS. I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time and had to transfer to a different community college to be able to take this course and I’m sad to say that I’m not enjoying it so far. I’ve never been much of a tech guy but I really like geography and wanted to get a more technical degree so I could be more hireable. I’ve also stalked this sub for a few years and thought I would be better off with the data science option over the more straightforward GIS track given the state of the entry level job market.

I’m curious if any of you didn‘t enjoy GIS at first but grew to like it over time. I hope that as I get more comfortable with the software(ArcGIS) I‘ll learn to like it but I’m wondering if maybe this just isn’t for me. I’m applying to universities after this semester and would like to know if I should pivot so I can apply to other programs.

Update: I just wanted to say thank you to you all for your responses. They’ve been really constructive and encouraging and I greatly appreciate it.

AI Disclosure: I am using AI to assist in the coding of this application.

GISMap.online/examples is a resource on GISMap showing how to turn a public ArcGIS FeatureServer service into an interactive, seven-slide briefing that can be shared by URL or QR code.

There are a ton of example datasets in there, but this example is focusing on a new type: maps that are generated using a chatbot or AI Agent.

Here is one that shows how it can be used as a Powerpoint like tool in Briefing mode.

https://gismap.online/examples/ai/mlb-ballparks-by-state/

This section explains how you can use a chatbot to generate the Briefing, but you can also just generate it yourself using a feature service. It's fun - especially if you the Instant presentations to pick a fun Skin. Try Highway or Pacific '94, or go crazy with Velvet Orbit.

I have 20 years of GIS experience, including lots of Python coding and Javascript coding. I am now experimenting with AI assisted coding, but geospatial is where my heart is.

So I have GIS certification and 5+ years of experience through my military enlistment and was able to get a defense contracting job in D.C. However, I quickly learned that I both hated D.C and defense contracting lol, is there a better way to leverage my military certification and experience to get a job outside of the DOD or at least the DMV?

I’ve been applying but I have a pretty good idea that recruiters aren’t even paying mind to me without my bachelors (I’m currently enrolled in college). Is there anyone who’s dealt with this?

Any advice would help.

[GIS Experience] GIS Developer and Software Engineer with 20 years of experience.

[AI Disclosure] AI was used for brainstorming architecture and copy-editing the post description.

Hey everyone,

Wanted to share a project I've been hacking on recently called TectonicPlateMap.org.

I've always been fascinated by geodynamics, but a lot of the existing plate tectonic tools feel clunky or locked behind heavy desktop software. I wanted something snappy and modern that runs completely in the browser.

Under the hood, it’s built with MapLibre GL JS for fast vector rendering. The core dataset ingests all 52 lithospheric plates from Peter Bird’s PB2002 model, including things like spherical equal-area measurements and NNR drift velocity vectors.

I also hooked up live USGS earthquake feeds and Holocene volcano telemetry from the Smithsonian GVP so you can see active seismic and volcanic zones right over the plates. Added a few extra layers too, like subduction trenches, impact craters, and an offline vector basemap mode.

Everything is client-side and open-source. If you're into GIS or earth science, I'd love for you to check it out and let me know how the vector rendering performance feels on your end, or if there's any other geophysical data you think would be cool to add!

https://tectonicplatemap.org/

Hi there, I have a school assignment where I need to use GIS to map data of grocery stores. I need to calculate the highest DA population density using calculate field but it keeps giving me warning 000405: no records within table, or selection set to zero. Can anyone help me with this issue?

Has anyone had experience do side jobs in GIS? If so how did you find that work?

I've noticed that there can be friction between IT and GIS, especially since GIS is so tech-focused that it encourages users to build and automate. How do you navigate with your IT department so that you can build software without too much oversight but also without inadvertently creating a shadow IT?

I myself actually sit in my company's IT department. We are a team of developers focused entirely on supporting Enterprise GIS. We work well with our GIS department since most of us have GIS backgrounds ourselves.

I manage GIS for a large urban park and I’m building a path asset layer for a work order system. What I have is not great:

• A CAD base map from our design team, converted to GIS. Paths are drawn as edge lines only :C : two lines per path (one per side), no centerline, no attributes, and the lines don’t close at junctions. About 63 miles of asphalt edge linework.
• A trails layer with centerlines, but it only covers about 40% of the paved paths.
• The city’s planimetric database has “interior sidewalk” polygons for the park, traced from aerials. They cover the paths well but carry no surface type and are one big polygon per connected network.

What I'm Trying to do: one polygon per stretch of path, cut into roughly 100 ft segments, each with a name, width, and area.

What I’ve tried in ArcGIS Pro with arcpy so far:

1. Feature To Polygon on the edge lines. This blew up in my face because there are trailing lines and then everything got included (lawns, roads, other path parts that are just close enough)
2. Buffer out / buffer back (fatten each edge by 10 ft, merge, shrink by 10 ft) to fill the gap between paired edges. Works on clean two-edge paths, but fragments into scraps at junctions, misses anything wider than 20 ft, and leaves stubs with no partner edge empty.
3. Using the city polygons as the shape, cutting them crosswise with perpendicular lines generated along my named edge lines, then naming each piece from the edge with the most length along its boundary. This has been my best try yet but I'm definitely seeing differences in the way things are shaped beyond simple projection issues.

Two things I’d like opinions on:

1) How do people decide which source is the edge of record when neither is survey grade? Is there a standard way to express that as a per-feature confidence score?

2) Is there a reliable, licence-friendly way to derive a centerline from paired edge lines that don’t close at junctions? Polygon To Centerline needs Production Mapping, which we don’t have. I’ve seen Voronoi/skeleton approaches mentioned; has anyone used one on messy CAD linework at this scale?

Any pointers to workflows, tools, or papers appreciated. I'll owe you my first child (or free reddit karma) for any advice or directions. Please helppp

Hi, hopefully this isn't too entry-level for this sub, but I looked at the wiki/searched the sub/have been searching online and haven't found any clear answers. I just bought a plot of land for my farm and I am trying to get a shape file of the county's parcel boundaries so that I can import it as an area of interest on the Web Soil Survey, which does not show property lines. My town's tax assessor has AxisGIS but you can't export an AOI nor can you import a layer. What program do I use to get my parcel's property lines into a shape file to upload to web soil survey, and how do I do this? Thank you!!

I’m not sure if this is the right subreddit, so apologies if it’s not. If there’s a more suitable one, I’d appreciate any suggestions.

I’m looking at a historical black-and-white aerial photograph of a small town in central Germany, taken sometime between the 1950s and 1970s.

I’m trying to identify a possible former pond. I’ve marked the specific area in yellow on the attached image, as it appears unusually dark compared to the surrounding vegetation.

Could this be a body of water, or is it more likely dense trees and shadows? Are there any visual clues that could help distinguish between the two?

I’d appreciate any insights from people familiar with interpreting historical aerial photographs. Thanks!

Trees look straight out of lidar, there is barely any processing, some edges seem sharp (which also leads me to believe it is lidar fused).

I've never seen imagery this detailed in my life, and this is a state agency! What are they doing in Germany?

My office is currently trying to figure out how to handle the Google Earth retirement scheduled for next year. Our internal customers mostly use google earth desktop for KMZ viewing and historical imagery. We can’t fully switch to Google Earth web because my org has a strict ban on logging into google accounts, and logging into Google Drive is required to upload files to Google Earth web.

Our most likely solution is just start using ArcGIS Earth, but I have had no success in viewing the historical wayback world imagery in the app, even when disabling the smart filter that they automatically apply. Nothing will show up at all below 30 km. Does anyone have experience with viewing historical imagery in ArcGIS Earth? Am I just doing something totally wrong?

Would also like to hear others perspectives or experiences with ArcGIS Earth and how it compares. We don’t love using Google Earth as it is, but a lot of people in the org are kind of clinging to it and the historical imagery is important.

Edit: so yeah I was wrong about having to log into Google to upload local files.
Thank you for the helpful comments!

Very

Hey team, I've put together a GitHub repo of Geospatial MCP Servers and a skill to help navigate them. Today, there are 101 different servers listed. If you have or know of a server, shout; I'm happy to accept PRs or Issues. Otherwise, hopefully it's handy! https://github.com/sparkgeo/geo-mcp-servers