I thought it might be interesting to look at alcohol consumption and production around the world. I expected the data to be pretty easy to find an process – how wrong can you be!

Consumption figures came from the World Health Organization via Our World in Data, which publishes recorded per capita alcohol consumption broken down by beverage type — beer, wine and spirits — for most countries in the world, with data running up to 2020. The WHO figures measure litres of pure alcohol, so Claude converted these to litres of finished drink using standard ABV assumptions (beer 5%, wine 12%, spirits 40%). The total consumption layer uses pure alcohol to allow a fair comparison across drink types.

https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/torchgeo-organization-ibm-research/

The TorchGeo Organization and IBM Research are joining forces!

The TerraTorch and TerraKit libraries have joined the TorchGeo Organization! https://github.com/torchgeo is now home to 3 of the most influential and widely used open-source GeoAI libraries:

El espacio no es contexto, es estructura.

Los Sistemas de Información Geográfica (GIS) parecen hoy inseparables de disciplinas como urbanismo, planificación territorial o gestión ambiental. Sin embargo, su presencia en la enseñanza académica es sorprendentemente desigual: omnipresente en geografía, marginal en arquitectura, casi inexistente en sociología, economía o ciencias políticas. Lo paradójico es que el concepto fundacional del GIS no nació de la informática ni de la ingeniería, sino de algo mucho más antiguo y urgente: un epidemiólogo británico tratando de detener una epidemia.

En 1854, Londres sufría un grave brote de cólera. La teoría dominante era clara y científicamente respaldada: la enfermedad se transmitía por el aire —los llamados «miasmas». Pero John Snow, médico con una observación incómoda, sospechaba que la teoría estaba radicalmente equivocada.

I am struggling to come up with an idea for what to map next. A bit of a brain freeze. Have you got an idea? Leave a suggestion in the comments.

Week 15 was my peak week before Quad Rock on May 9. I didn't run a lot, but it was all high quality running.

• 14 hours, 23 minutes all training

• 24.8 miles running

• 6,020 feet D+ running

Tuesday I hiked and ran up and down Green Mountain in Boulder, my first time on that mountain. I went up the steeper east side and down the more runnable west side. The trail is ridiculously steep: in the first mile I gained 1,300 feet of elevation. There's a ladder at one point, that's how steep it is. The second mile has a short runnable section and averages only 19%. I went steadily to the top and ran the downhills of Ranger and Gregory Canyon as fast as I could while sight-reading. Green Mountain is fun, easy to access, and loved almost to death by Boulderites. The Amphitheater and Saddle Rock trails are in sad shape.

We want to share some updates we have made on the QGIS Plugin Repository. In January 2026 we shared QEP 409. The proposal seeks to improve the general working practices with QGIS plugins, adding some optional and some mandatory checks to every plugin that gets published in the QGIS plugin repo. This builds on initial work (see PR) we did to run ‘soft’ checks on every plugin when they are published.

We also ‘back ran’ the new security checks on every existing plugin in the plugin repository (latest versions only) and assigned them a security badge without blocking or removing any plugin from being published.

La versión 2.7 de gvSIG Desktop incluye una nueva herramienta que permite convertir coordenadas entre distintos sistemas de referencia, que facilita por ejemplo el poder buscar coordenadas de puntos que se tienen en un sistema diferente al de la vista desde la propia aplicación, y no tener que acudir a herramientas externas. En el caso de coordenadas geográficas se puede seleccionar formato decimal, o grados, minutos y segundos.

Esta herramienta complementa al capturador de coordenadas, herramienta que ya existía en versiones anteriores de gvSIG Desktop, y con la que se podía obtener las coordenadas de un punto sobre la vista en el sistema de referencia elegido, aunque la vista estuviese en un sistema diferente. Esta herramienta permitía además guardar dichos puntos, para ser utilizados en algunos geoprocesos.

En el siguiente vídeo se muestra el funcionamiento de ambas herramientas:

Se você já trabalha com dados geoespaciais, provavelmente domina análise. Mas deixa eu te provocar:

Você sabe transformar isso em uma solução acessível na web?

Porque existe uma diferença enorme entre:

Gerar mapas
E entregar uma plataforma que outras pessoas realmente usam

E é exatamente aí que entra o WebGIS.

Hoje, quem se destaca não é só quem analisa dados… É quem consegue:

Centralizar informações
Publicar serviços padronizados (OGC)
Criar aplicações acessíveis via navegador
Controlar acesso e usuários
Escalar o uso dos dados

Em outras palavras: sair do desktop e ir para internet.

Agora vem o ponto que trava muita gente:

“Pra fazer isso eu preciso programar?”

Não.

Com as ferramentas certas, você consegue construir um WebGIS completo usando:

GeoServer 3.0-RC is now available, and with it we can celebrate something bigger than a release candidate.

This milestone is the concrete outcome of a successful community crowdfunding campaign.

When we launched the GeoServer 3 crowdfunding initiative in September 2024, the goal was ambitious. GeoServer needed more than incremental maintenance. It needed a full platform modernization, including a new generation user experience, a stronger security foundation, a modern Java stack, improved raster processing, and the engineering effort required to carry those changes across the broader GeoServer ecosystem.

That work is now visible in GeoServer 3.0-RC.

I needed my training to begin to peak in week 14. Quad Rock is in 20 days (at this writing), and I won't get much adaptation to workout loading in the last 13 days. Weeks 14 and 15 would be my last opportunities to get faster and stronger before the race. Fortunately, a return to good health and favorable weather helped make this my best week yet.

• 13 hours, 8 minutes all training

• 42.7 miles running

• 8,550 feet D+ running and treadmill

The first block of my training was dedicated to power and pure speed, The second to intense aerobic efforts. This last block is about going up and down technical mountain trails at my race pace or a bit faster. In practice, I push pretty hard for half of each climb, run the downhills as fast as I can, and otherwise keep it easy, but not slow.

GeoServer 3.0-RC is now available, with downloads for ( bin, war ), along with docs and extensions. We are working with OSGeo for the windows installer download, and will update this post when it is available. Windows users are asked to test out the bin download while we wait. Release available as docker image docker.osgeo.org/geoserver:3.0-RC .

É oficial! É com muita alegria e entusiasmo que confirmo minha participação no FOSS4G 2026 em Hiroshima! 🇯🇵

Para quem não está familiarizado, o FOSS4G é o maior evento do mundo dedicado ao software livre geoespacial. Organizado pela OSGeo, é o lugar onde desenvolvedores, usuários e entusiastas se reúnem para moldar o futuro das geotecnologias.

Antes de falar das apresentações, quero expressar meu profundo agradecimento à comissão organizadora. Sabemos que realizar um evento desta magnitude exige uma dedicação quase sobre-humana. O o trabalho de vocês é fundamental para fortalecer o ecossistema global de software livre geoespacial. Obrigado por tornarem isso possível!

At OPENGIS.ch, we believe that the long-term health of the QGIS ecosystem depends on more than just adding new features. Critical work like bugfixing, code reviews, codebase maintenance, and quality assurance often goes unnoticed, yet it is essential to delivering the stable, reliable software that thousands of organisations depend on every day. That is why we launched the QGIS Sustainability Initiative (#sustainQGIS). For every support contract of more than 10 days, we donate development time to the initiative. In addition, all unused hours at the end of the year of each contract are also donated. This ensures that buying an OPENGIS.ch support contract directly helps enable the long-term, sustainable development of the QGIS and QField ecosystem.

At OPENGIS.ch, we believe that the long-term health of the QGIS ecosystem depends on more than just adding new features. Critical work like bugfixing, code reviews, codebase maintenance, and quality assurance often goes unnoticed, yet it is essential to delivering the stable, reliable software that thousands of organisations depend on every day. That is why we launched the QGIS Sustainability Initiative (#sustainQGIS). For every support contract of more than 10 days, we donate development time to the initiative. In addition, all unused hours at the end of the year of each contract are also donated. This ensures that buying an OPENGIS.ch support contract directly helps enable the long-term, sustainable development of the QGIS and QField ecosystem.

Warning It was discovered after the PROJ 9.8.0 release that several EPSG updates introduced after EPSG v12.033 – notably the introduction of national realizations of ETRS89 (ETRS89-XXX […] where XXX is the 3-letter ISO country code) – caused backward...

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It’s my pleasure to announce the release of PROJ 9.8.1!

The release includes a few updates, bug fixes and a major regression fix for ETRS89-related coordinates operations.
See the release notes below.

Download the archives here:

At OPENGIS.ch, we create open-source software.
We are contributors, maintainers, and in the case of QField, the team that builds it.

That comes with a responsibility we take seriously: giving back.

“Give back” is not a slogan. It is our first core value, and the very reason the sustainability initiative exists.

Open-source is a garden. If you eat from it, water it, and keep seeding.

QGIS.org is pleased to announce that we will be using some of the funding that is donated to us by our users and sustaining members to fund a dedicated administrative role for the project. 

Principle duties:

David Bann and Liam Wright have put together a great guide to Generative AI Tools for Quantitative Research on the NCRM resources site. This is a great overview of what Generative AI is, how it works and all of the potential different models available, both commercial and open source, as well as how to run some models locally rather than relying on the cloud.

They are also very focused on the practical elements of how to actually use the tools in your work, discussing the different approaches as well as highlighting the importance of making sure you do not share sensitive data with cloud services.

They also have a great selection of videos for setting up both cloud based and local LLMs for working with Stata and R scripts in a number of tools including VS Code:

In week 12, I started to get things back on track after being sick. I ran five days, biked one day, and took Saturday off to take my family to a Nuggets game in Denver.

• 12 hours, 9 minutes all training

• 34.8 miles running

• 5,800 ft D+ running (and treadmill)

My energy level was low to mid until Friday, when I rallied for a good interval workout on a 12% incline treadmill indoors and a sauna session after. My fitness didn't advance much in week ten, but I didn't lose a step. According to the machine, I went "up" beyond any of the Quad Rock climbs, and at a pace that I'd love to hit on race day.

Listening to the news about the impact of the current war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, I was prompted to think about critical minerals that could also have massive disruptive impact in geopolitical turmoil.

I asked Claude “Can you build a dataset of the most critical minerals, where they are mined (mine sites or countries), shares of world production, price changes over 5-10 years, main usages so that we can build a map of these commodities. Build it in a way that we can extend if we find more data” and it found me some data using these sources:

Cloud masking is one of those steps you cannot really avoid when working with satellite data. Yet, it is often more cumbersome than it needs to be: different sensors come with different workflows, tools, and preprocessing requirements.

That is why I like OmniCloudMask. It is a Python library for cloud and cloud shadow detection in high to moderate resolution satellite imagery. Instead of relying on sensor-specific approaches, it uses a single model that generalizes across platforms.

According to the documentation, it supports resolutions from 10 m to 50 m and works with imagery from Sentinel-2, Landsat, PlanetScope, Maxar, and other sensors with Red, Green, and NIR bands. In practice, however, it also performs well on higher-resolution data, such as the 1.2 m Pléiades NEO imagery used in this example.

Having knocked up a simple fuel finder based on a csv download from the government site at the beginning of the week I thought “How difficult could it be to make something more functional and elegant and connect to the government fuel finder API?” Answer – the “more functional and elegant” not too difficult – about 3 hours of vibe coding, Connecting to the API and refreshing regularly – pretty damn hard even with Claude helping me.

For comparison here is the first version using a downloaded file

The map pins are simple, the pop-up has limited info and worst of all there are all those miscoded petrol stations in the North Sea.

This morning there was a lot of amused banter amongst my geo-pals about the UK Government’s Fuel Finder API based on an article in The Times (possible paywall) on the problems with the data. You can download the data or access the api from the gov.uk site.

I was thinking about what map to make next and I thought about flags, national symbols like birds or animals.

I started out with a very simple prompt to see what Claude would come up with:

I want to make an interactive map of national symbols: Flags, Trees, Flowers, Animal, Symbols,Anything else you can suggest?

It chundered away for a few minutes and came up with this monster

Yes it is truly awful! You can click on the map above to see it in action, it sort of works but the map part is rubbish (but probably represents Claude’s limited sense of world geography) and the linked data is pretty flaky as well. When I challenged Claude it explained that it was using “training data” I guess that means “any old crap that I could scrape.

El pasado webinar organizado por KAN Territory & IT reunió a la comunidad geoespacial de habla hispana para presentar las principales novedades de GeoNode 5 y explorar cómo evoluciona el ecosistema hacia arquitecturas modernas basadas en la nube.

En este artículo, resumimos los principales conceptos y avances compartidos durante el encuentro.

GeoNode es una plataforma open source diseñada para la gestión, publicación y análisis de datos geoespaciales, ampliamente utilizada para construir Infraestructuras de Datos Espaciales (IDE) y sistemas SIG.

Permite a organizaciones:

Non è facile cominciare a raccontare questa storia, quindi comincio da dove mi viene in mente. Avete presente un gasometro? Avete mai visto un gasometro dal vivo o in foto, in video, in televisione? Fino ad alcuni anni fa per me era una parola un po’ strana eppure è diventato uno dei luoghi con cui ho a che fare più spesso nella mia vita quotidiana. A Ventimiglia, dentro un’area archeologica romana abbastanza famosa e importante, ci sono due gasometri. Alcuni anni fa ho iniziato a occuparmi di questi due gasometri e di tutto quello che ci sta intorno che si chiama Officina del Gas è un impianto abbastanza grande, di 12.000 m² che dal 1906 al 1993 ha funzionato per dare il gas alla città.

Prima di iniziare a lavorare veramente alla realizzazione del progetto, con alcune persone molto preparate ho iniziato a studiare la storia di questo luogo e a farmi raccontare dalle persone che ci vivono accanto che cosa rappresenta per loro.