A lot of the posts that we share on Mappery come via our social feeds at Mastodon and Bluesky as either an @ message or a hashtag #MapsintheWild. Up till now our workflow to turn the social posts into blog posts on Mappery was something like this:

This might be a long post, it was a pretty challenging project.

I wrote last week about my Amazing Animals in Crisis map of 50 endangered species, I got some bad news on Friday that my usage of the IUCN polygon data was in breach of their licencing conditions and a request that I take the map down, which I promptly did. This was a big disappointment as I was just about to expand the map to almost 400 species and now I had no data.

Learning – even if data is apparently free and open, carefully read the license conditions before you use it. Obvious, I know, but I had to learn the hard way.

I was requested to take down this map by the IUCN team (International Union for the Conserfvation of Nature) because my usage breached their license terms.

TorchGeo 0.10 is the largest release in TorchGeo history, with a record 220 PRs from a record 29 contributors over the last 6 months. It includes full time series support, fiscal sponsorship, and security hardening, among many other exciting new features!

The last two years have seen a dedicated effort to add full time series support to TorchGeo. As of this release, TorchGeo contains dozens of time series benchmark datasets:

TorchGeo 0.9 includes 13 new datasets and a number of improvements required for better time series support, encompassing 3 months of hard work by 15 contributors from around the world. We are now trying to make more frequent releases to get exciting new features out to users as quickly as possible!

TorchGeo was the first library to provide pre-trained geospatial foundation models, and offers more GeoFMs than all other GeoML libraries combined [1]. Users have always had the ability to generate their own embeddings using TorchGeo. However, using FMs requires considerable expertise and compute, preventing widespread adoption.

We’ve overhauled the project creation flow in QFieldCloud to make getting your field data campaigns off the ground faster than ever. Along with a clean new web interface, we are introducing two highly requested features to boost your team’s productivity: more advanced project creation, with native XLSForm imports and 1-click project cloning! 🚀

When creating a new project, you can now define the initial extent field right away. You can also configure a basemap using OSM or a custom XYZ layer. What is more, you can set whether you prefer to keep the original color, or convert the basemap into dark or light themes.

We are also thrilled to introduce a completely new way to generate projects: XLSForm support.

Mappery has been my side project for 8 years, for the last 5 or 6 years Arnaud Ferrand has been my co-editor and the tech brain that keeps the site running. Mappery is a large WordPress site with 2,500 posts and 3,500 images of Maps in the Wild (pictures of maps in the street, on clothes, furniture, alcohol etc).

For several years we had a map plugin that allowed us to enter a coordinate pair for a post and to render a clustered map with pins representing each post, click on a pin and the post image and some text appears in the popup with a link to the post. It worked ok but the map used the Google Maps API which had cost implications and we also had several complications with the map not rendering and the plugin wasn’t being maintained.

The new MovingPandas release 0.23 has just landed in pypi and conda-forge and I want to share with you two highlights:

The new HTML representations for Trajectory & TrajectoryCollection objects aim to make interactive data exploration in notebooks more convenient by providing commonly required descriptive data summaries and data previews in a structured way.

Before 0.23

New in 0.23

For reports, presentations, and websites, I regularly need maps: a raster layer, contextual boundaries, a legend, and maybe a logo. Nothing requiring an elaborate page layout. And I often need more than one. For the COMBINED project, for example, I map the same study area in Rotterdam over and over. The extent, the boundaries, and the logo stay put; only the raster and its legend change. Exactly the kind of repetition worth automating.

A Inteligência Artificial já está transformando a maneira como profissionais GIS analisam dados, automatizam processos e desenvolvem soluções geoespaciais.

Neste curso, você aprenderá a aplicar IA generativa, agentes inteligentes e automação em ferramentas como QGIS, PostGIS, GeoServer e GeoNode, por meio de cases, exercícios práticos e problemas inspirados em projetos reais.

Você verá como utilizar IA para gerar e revisar consultas SQL espaciais, detectar inconsistências, corrigir geometrias, automatizar publicações no GeoServer, criar estilos SLD, produzir metadados, analisar dados no QGIS e desenvolver fluxos geoespaciais mais inteligentes.

https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/osgeo-joins-new-geocommons-fund/

Largest European investment to date into open geo tooling

The European Commission is making a strategic investment of 6 million Euro into an ambitious new programme to support free and open source software in the geospatial domain.

The new GeoCommons programme will be handing out grants directly to researchers and developers working on geospatial commons.

For many years now, we have been enjoying the basemap.at service with it’s various basemap options (color, gray, with/without labels, …) in WMTS and vector tiles.

For a few weeks now, there is an additional service by BEV: Their cartographic models “Kartographischen Modelle (KM)” are now available as raster (KM-R) in COG-TIFF format.

Prezado leitor,

Neste post irei apresentar como instalar o GeoServer 3 juntamente com o PostgreSQL 18/PostGIS utilizando Docker em um servidor executando Ubuntu Linux 26.04.

Ao final deste tutorial você terá um ambiente pronto para desenvolvimento, testes ou treinamentos, contendo:

• PostgreSQL 18 + PostGIS 3.6
• GeoServer 3.0.0
• Nginx como proxy reverso
• Estrutura organizada para persistência dos dados
• Instalação totalmente baseada em containers Docker

Pré-requisitos:

• Ubuntu 26.04
• Acesso sudo
• Conexão com Internet
• Pelo menos 4 GB RAM (8 GB recomendado)

Sem enrolação, vamos aos passos:

1. Atualizar o Ubuntu

Antes de instalar qualquer software é recomendável atualizar os repositórios e aplicar as últimas atualizações do sistema operacional.

If you have ever tried styling a vector map in Maputnik, you have probably hit this wall: you have a folder full of perfectly designed SVG icons, but there is no simple “Upload SVG” button for your symbol layers.

Unlike desktop GIS software, web mapping specifications (like MapLibre and Mapbox GL) are optimised for rendering speed. Loading hundreds of individual SVG files requires too many HTTP requests and bogs down performance. Instead, the style specification requires a sprite sheet : a single raster image (PNG) containing all your icons, paired with an index file (JSON) that tells the map exactly where each icon sits on that image.

El Inside the Lab CITIUS ha cumplido 10 años y hemos vuelto a asistir para vivirlo de cerca. El Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxias Intelixentes (CITIUS) es un centro tecnológico de la USC (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela), ha celebrado una nueva edición de su jornada de puertas abiertas para enseñar los demostradores de los proyectos que desarrollan en sus instalaciones. Es un día para, directamente, venirse arriba con la ciencia que se hace aquí al lado.

Este año la cita era todavía más especial por alcanzar esa cifra redonda de una década de divulgación y tecnología.

Tras recorrer gvSIG Desktop en los siete primeros vídeos del curso y desplegar el geoportal en gvSIG Online en el vídeo 8, llega el turno de gvSIG Mapps, la pieza móvil de la Suite. Es la aplicación pensada para llevar el geoportal al terreno: el técnico municipal sale a campo con tableta o móvil, consulta las mismas capas publicadas en Online y, si tiene permisos, edita los datos desde la propia posición sin pasos intermedios de vuelta al servidor.

Con el vídeo anterior cerramos el bloque dedicado a gvSIG Desktop. En este octavo damos el salto a la segunda pieza de la Suite: gvSIG Online, la plataforma web sobre la que se montan los geoportales municipales. Donde en Desktop el proyecto se quedaba en el equipo y la salida final era estática (un PDF, un plano impreso), con Online ese mismo trabajo se publica en internet y queda disponible para que cualquier técnico o ciudadano lo consulte desde el navegador.

It’s been a couple of busy weeks, with the QGIS 4.2 release and meetings and conferences all over the place before a few, hopefully quieter, weeks of summer break.

The Austrian QGIS user group met online on 25 June to exchange experiences with different webmapping solutions, ranging from QGIS+Lizmap to QGIS Cloud.

Para organizaciones científicas como el Instituto de Ciencias del Mar (ICM), la alineación con los estándares internacionales no es solo una cuestión técnica, sino una necesidad estratégica para que sus investigaciones tengan un impacto real.

El uso de estándares permite que los datos dejen de ser archivos estáticos y aislados para convertirse en «datos vivos», capaces de integrarse en redes globales y ser utilizados por la comunidad científica internacional. Los principales marcos utilizados en este proyecto son:

Hasta ahora hemos trabajado dentro del documento Vista: cargar capas, simbolizarlas, consultarlas, editarlas. En este séptimo vídeo damos el paso al documento Mapa, que es el componedor cartográfico de gvSIG Desktop, donde montamos una salida lista para imprimir o exportar a PDF, con su rótulo, su leyenda, su escala, su norte y su logotipo institucional.

Partimos del proyecto electoral que ya usamos en los vídeos 3 y 5 (mesas electorales, ejes de carreteras y distritos electorales). Antes de pasar al Mapa, dejamos la Vista preparada como queremos que aparezca impresa: aplicamos una simbología por valores únicos sobre los distritos y configuramos un etiquetado por el campo districte, ajustando fuente, tamaño y color.

La soberanía digital europea se ha convertido en una de las grandes cuestiones estratégicas de nuestro tiempo. Ya no se trata únicamente de disponer de tecnología, sino de decidir qué tecnología usamos, bajo qué condiciones, con qué garantías y con qué capacidad real de control sobre nuestros datos, infraestructuras y servicios críticos.

Hasta ahora hemos cargado capas que ya existían (locales o publicadas como servicio). En este sexto vídeo damos el paso de crear y editar nuestra propia cartografía dentro de gvSIG Desktop, recorriendo los tres tipos básicos de geometría: puntos, líneas y polígonos. Es el flujo más habitual cuando un ayuntamiento necesita crear información propia o completar la que ya tiene.

Partimos del WMTS de imágenes Sentinel y ortofotos PNOA del IGN (el mismo que usamos en el vídeo 4), hacemos zoom sobre Cullera y añadimos también el shapefile ‘camins_cullera’ como capa de apoyo, repasando de paso cómo personalizar su simbología.

We are preparing version v4.0.0 of the QGIS Plugins Website (https://plugins.qgis.org), a planned milestone release scheduled for 13 July 2026. Below is a summary of what is coming and how it may affect plugin developers, so you can review ahead of time.

This will be our first major release that adopts a proper announcement and release schedule. It will include major improvements and changes related to the security checks and plugins auto-approval; and a new feature for Qt6 compatibility check which was funded by Oslandia (oslandia.com) and developed by @florentfougeres.

After I published my map of defence spending a friend suggested that it would be interesting to see how things had changed since the end of the Cold War in 1990/91.

I knew that the data I had covered a longer time period so I asked Claude if we could update the map and it checked the data and confirmed that there was reasonable data coverage back to the mid 70’s so I decided to backdate (or is it update?) the map to run from 1975 to 2024.

The extended map now runs from 1975 to 2024, covering periods that include the final years of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the post-9/11 surge in Western defence spending, and the sharp remilitarisation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The first half of summer has flown by. I'm quickly catching up on six busy weeks here.

• 53 hours, 52 minutes all training

• 130.1 miles running and hiking

• 16,220 feet D+ running and hiking

That's about 9 hours of exercise, 22 miles of running and hiking, and 2,700 feet D+ per week. I've been active enough to maintain my base fitness, but haven't done much building. Travel and vacation have kept me from sticking to a regular workout schedule.

In week two, I participated in Laramie's Pilot Hill Classic 25K race for the first time. I experienced cramps again, but not as bad as at Quad Rock. I tripped a few times on the way down, and once did a full Superman dive, head-first, onto a smooth (luckily) stretch of trail. I had some calf cramps and a bloody elbow after that, but the cramps cleared up before the finish.

Green plains and hills under a partly cloudy sky at dawn.

With Keir Starmer recently losing a Defence Secretary and then leaving a budgetary timebomb for his successor as PM, Andy Burnham, I thought it might be interesting to see how we rank on defence spending and who are the world’s largest exporters and importers of arms.

I started out by trying to find some data on arm sales and Claude sent me to SIPRI where you can download very granular data on almost every transaction but after playing with the data I decided to take a simpler approach and map expenditure as a % of GDP (which is what Trump and the NATO powers have been arguing about) and exports and imports of major arms.

Después de ver cómo conectar servicios remotos, en este quinto vídeo entramos en el Administrador de complementos, la herramienta que permite ampliar la suite con paquetes adicionales: nuevos formatos de datos, librerías de símbolos, geoprocesos, conectores a servicios remotos, etc.

En los vídeos anteriores trabajamos con datos en local (shapefiles, ortofotos descargadas). En este cuarto vídeo nos conectamos a servicios cartográficos publicados en internet por organismos oficiales, sin necesidad de descargar nada: los estándares OGC WMS y WMTS. Para un ayuntamiento esto se traduce en poder usar como fondo o como capa de consulta la cartografía del PNOA, del Catastro o del IGN, siempre actualizada y mantenida por su productor.

Nuestra QGISesCamp2026 se ha celebrado felizmente en Madrid el pasado sábado 13 de junio de 2026. El evento, con su carácter presencial como espacio de encuentro, intercambio de conocimiento, experiencias y proyectos ha conseguido una vez más el fortalecimiento de la comunidad QGIS en España. Este año ha contado con la participación de más de sesenta personas (un 28% de mujeres): cincuenta y ocho provenientes de diversos lugares como Salamanca, Granada, Córdoba, Santander, Barcelona, Murcia, Valencia, Málaga o Pamplona, además de Madrid, y tres personas asistiendo de manera remota.

En el vídeo anterior cargamos capas y trabajamos su representación visual. En este tercero vamos a lo que hay “detrás” de la geometría: la tabla de atributos. Cualquier capa en un SIG lleva asociada una tabla con los datos descriptivos de cada elemento, y aprender a moverse con soltura entre mapa y tabla es uno de los hábitos más útiles del trabajo diario.

Partimos de un proyecto con tres capas centradas en un caso muy habitual en la gestión municipal, la organización electoral: mesas electorales (puntos), ejes de carreteras (líneas) y distritos electorales (polígonos). De paso nos sirve para repasar los tres tipos de geometría con los que vamos a trabajar a lo largo del curso. Sobre los distritos aplicamos una simbología por valores únicos, esta vez clasificando por un campo de la propia tabla.

I’d like to introduce gitRmap: a semi-automated map of locations that you can add your own points to. It’s designed for people who are new to GIS, but who know a little bit of Git.

You can create a map like the one below, with your own pins on it, just by following the quick start at nickbearman.com/gitRmap.

If you get stuck, I want to know! Message me, email me or open an issue on GitHub.

I wanted to create a tool that made it easier for more people to make maps. There are plenty of tools out there for creating a web map, but for someone new to GIS they can be pretty intimidating.

Después de la entrega introductoria, en este segundo vídeo damos el salto a la parte práctica con gvSIG Desktop. Es la primera sesión aplicada del curso y empieza por el principio: dónde descargar gvSIG Desktop (la versión portable 2.7.0 para Windows o Linux) desde la web de SCOLAB, cómo realizar la configuración inicial básica del programa (idioma, sistema de referencia por defecto, unidades de mapa) y cómo se organiza la aplicación a partir del Gestor de proyecto y sus tipos de documentos: Vistas, Tablas, Mapas e Informes.

Con este primer vídeo arrancamos el curso de manejo básico de la Suite gvSIG (Desktop, Online y Mapps) aplicado a la gestión municipal. Se trata de una entrega introductoria, dedicada a situar el contexto antes de entrar en la parte práctica de las próximas sesiones.

La información geográfica empieza a transformar una administración cuando deja de estar encerrada en documentos, mapas estáticos o sistemas aislados. La Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales de Uruguay es un gran ejemplo de ello. En el último año ha seguido ampliando su ecosistema de visualizadores temáticos, llevando la información geográfica oficial a ámbitos tan diversos como la justicia, la administración departamental, el deporte o la autoridad electoral.

En los últimos meses se han incorporado nuevos visualizadores en ámbitos tan diversos como:

Over the years, QField has gained a number of ways through which authors can share their mapping projects. This post looks at the multiple ways this can be achieved and what scenarios fit each method best.

QFieldCloud users all have the ability to configure their projects as ‘public’. When the option is turned on, all QFieldCloud users will be allowed to download and browse these maps at will.

These users coming in to view the map are given a reader role, prohibiting changes to the underlying datasets included in the project. This can be a great option when wanting to share maps to a large number of readers while relying on QFieldCloud to host the content and keep users up-to-date through synchronization.

On 3 June 2026, the European Commission adopted a new package of measures to strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty.

The package includes two legislative proposals —the Chips Act 2.0 and the Cloud and AI Development Act— together with the European Open Source Strategy and a strategic roadmap for digitalisation and artificial intelligence in the energy sector.

El pasado 3 de junio de 2026, la Comisión Europea adoptó un nuevo paquete de medidas para reforzar la soberanía tecnológica de Europa.

El paquete incluye dos propuestas legislativas —el Chips Act 2.0 y el Cloud and AI Development Act—, junto con la Estrategia Europea de Software Libre y una hoja de ruta estratégica para la digitalización y la inteligencia artificial en el sector energético.

Las Jornadas de SIG Libre de Girona han sido siempre un referente para Geomatico … porque han sido también la cuna de nuestra empresa, allá en 2011. En estos más de 15 años de conferencias hemos presentado multitud de charlas que celebran la esencia del desarrollo abierto: colaborar, aprender y devolver algo a la comunidad. Cada una aporta una perspectiva que invita a experimentar, contribuir y seguir construyendo tecnología que sirva a todos.

2025: Environmental Justice Atlas, un visor para conflictos ambientales

2025: Mapas de biodiversidad y estándares: del archivo al dato vivo

2025: Una nueva infraestructura compartida para las comunidades de geoinquietos al estilo DIWO

GeoServer 3.0.0 release is now available with downloads (bin, war, windows), along with docs and extensions.

This is a stable release of GeoServer 3.0.x series. GeoServer 3.0.0 is made in conjunction with GeoTools 35.0, and GeoWebCache 2.0.0.

Thanks to Andrea Aaime (GeoSolutions), Jody Garnett (GeoCat), and Peter Smythe (AfriGIS) for making this release.

GeoServer 3.0 is now generally available. This post is not a feature announcement, those have been written, and the release notes cover the details. This is something we get to do less often: closing the loop on a promise. The modernisation work the community funded is finished and shipping, and we want to account for what that funding set out to achieve and what it delivered.

The result is a platform brought back onto a current, supported foundation. The work reached across the wider ecosystem rather than GeoServer alone, and the scope the campaign promised has been covered.

Here’s another QField release, packed with the features that have been at the top of professional surveyors’ wish list! (hint: it’s in the title) — plus improvements across the board for our wide range of users.

First up, NTRIP support has been added in QField unlocking sub-centimeter accuracy position readings without the need for any third-party app. This has long been requested by cadastral surveyors and other professional field workers in need of highly accurate data where being a few centimeters off can have real consequences.

To configure an NTRIP connection, simply connect to an RTK capable GNSS device via Bluetooth, BLE or TCP from the QField settings positioning panel. Once connected, the NTRIP user interface will be visible just below the positioning devices combo box in the same panel.

Thanks to Mario Ame

Everything was working fine. I had just finished building the Grow Your Own allotments map, deployed it to the live server, and was feeling pretty pleased with myself. A few days later a friend messaged me that the map had stopped working. No regions, just a blank basemap. Checked the console and got this:

“Server returned no content-length header or content-length exceeding request. Check that your storage backend supports HTTP Byte Serving.”

The current outbreak of Ebola has inevitably triggered lots of maps of the outbreak, just search for “Maps of the Ebola outbreak in Africa” and you will find something like this.

Some of these are pretty good, some don’t communicate very well and a few are awful. My attention was drawn to a static map obviously generated by AI which was so so bad that it was laughable and you had to wonder why anyone share this without picking up the numerous obvious geographic errors.

My wife grows some vegetables in our back garden, she used to have an allotment but she gave it up and we dug up part of our grass. I got to wondering about allotments and whether they were a British phenomena or they were widely spread? Which countries have the most allotments, growing space per capita and the largest size of allotments?

Location: Remote (at least 4h overlap with CET)

Employment Type: Full-time (80-100%)

About OPENGIS.ch:
OPENGIS.ch is a team of Full-Stack GeoNinjas offering personalized open-source geodata solutions to Swiss and international clients. We are dedicated to using and developing open-source tools, providing flexibility, scalability, and future-proof solutions, and playing a key role in the free and open-source geospatial community. We pride ourselves on our agile and distributed nature, which allows us to have a motivated and multicultural team that supports each other in working together.

En la nueva versión de gvSIG Desktop, la 2.7, se han incluido tres herramientas que permiten crear geometrías de líneas y polígonos mediante rumbo y distancia. Para ello se han incluido tres funciones nuevas en el gestor de expresiones:

• PointByAngle(): Permite insertar nuevos puntos de la geometría mediante un ángulo y una distancia. El ángulo sería antihorario, siendo el origen 0º en dirección este. La fórmula sería:

PointByAngle(geometría, distancia, ángulo)

donde “geometría” sería el punto desde el cual se insertaría la nueva línea (siendo “$p0” el último punto insertado, “$p1” el penúltimo…), “distancia” sería la longitud del segmento en las unidades de la vista, y “ángulo” sería el ángulo en grados sexagesimales. Por ejemplo PointByAngle($p0,10, 10) sería como se muestra a continuación, 10 metros con un ángulo de 10º sobre la horizontal.

Filling a 4-year gap here! Did not find time to post itemized yearly overviews, plus other updates. And that while even more has been happening compared to the past "COVID-years". Will stick to highlights with a promise to add regular updates.

Below a brief overview of my professional life during 2022-2025. Highlights of living and working in the Open Source Geospatial and OSGeo(.nl |.org )-world,
organized by "Theme".

TL;DR Main 2022-2025 highlights:

With the release of QGIS 4, the question of the QGIS release cycle is arising again for many users.

Among the most common:

• what is the roadmap?
• how long will this version be maintained?
• is it a stable version?

The official QGIS roadmap page shows the current versions, along with a countdown to the next one.

I have attempted to simplify the QGIS release cycle, which can be unclear if you go too much into detail. Here is my perspective as a core QGIS developer, simplified to present the release cycle in a schematic way.

There are 3 types of QGIS versions:

Last week I had a call with Professor Gavin Hollis who is writing about Shakespeare’s use of maps and coining the term mapp’ry – you can read a bit more about our conversation here. That conversation prompted me to think about Shakespeare’s references to places in his plays and what that might tell me about his understanding of the world at the end of the 16th century. I thought this would be quite simple but of course the devil is in the detail!