The conversation around Looking for better ways to convert between QGIS VectorLayer and (Geo)DataFrame is continuing over at https://fosstodon.org/@underdarkGIS/115442614331293320

What I’ve learned so far:

• QgsVectorLayer.as_geopandas() has landed in QGIS master on 13 Oct 2025.
• There’s also QgsVectorLayer.field_to_numpy() which will be useful for many applications and has landed on 29 Oct 2025.
• QgsArrowIterator is in the works right now.

Exciting times for spatial data science tooling

Kenwood is a stately home and park near to where I live. They have a Halloween event on at the moment with an array of displays and activities around the park.

This isn’t normally a graveyard

El Ayuntamiento de Cullera ha dado un paso más en su proceso de transformación digital con la incorporación de un panel táctil interactivo en el cementerio municipal, que permite a cualquier persona localizar fácilmente la ubicación exacta de sus familiares y allegados.

Esta nueva herramienta se basa en la plataforma gvSIG Online, desarrollada por SCOLAB, y forma parte de un proyecto de digitalización que utiliza tecnologías geoespaciales para mejorar la gestión y el acceso a la información de todo el municipio.

Este viernes 17 de octubre estuvimos de cumpleaños. Agresta celebraba sus 25 años y, por suerte, teníamos invitación. Agresta es un nombre que nos acompaña desde hace tiempo, pero que tuvimos la oportunidad de desvirtualizar en el 9º Congreso Forestal celebrado en Gijón este 2025. Es una cooperativa del sector forestal, y precisamente sobre esas dos ideas —cooperativismo y sector forestal— giró el evento del viernes.

La primera parte estuvo dedicada al cooperativismo. Agresta es una cooperativa orgullosa de serlo, y organizó una mesa redonda con varias invitadas del mundo cooperativo. Hablaron sobre la importancia del cooperativismo, sus fortalezas y su situación actual, tanto a nivel nacional como internacional. Nos quedamos con esta maravilla:

We love a floor map and Ken spotted this beauty with flight routes at Salt Lake City Airport

Another floor map, this time from Kenneth Wong “a giant map of Yokohama on Yokohama Landmark Tower’s observation deck

An enormous map spreading out the floor is always a cool thing to me” – I agree

Ken spotted this carton of beer in his local supermarket.

Clare spotted this Mobile Library Map when rewatching Matilda the Musical. “Just rewatched Matilda the Musical and spotted the map
inside the Mobile Library when Matilda rushes out. It was acquired on pinboards from a reuse site – from the Studios!!
Amazing to think of all the art created for film and TV that may only get 0.1s on screen”

Plugin developers who want to use (Geo)Pandas-based functionality in their plugins regularly face the challenge of converting QGIS vector layers to (Geo)DataFrames. There is currently no built-in convenience function.

In Trajectools, so far, I have been performing the conversion manually, looping through all features and taking care of tricky column types, such as datetimes and geometries:

Ken shared this abstract Mammoth mountain ski trail map – $125 seems a fair price but you couldn’t really take it on the slopes with you.

I spotted this piece by Stephen Graham in a local gallery. I’m not sure that I’d like to have it hanging in my home but then I feel out of love with pop art nearly fifty years ago! I do like the way my photo picks up the old buildings reflected in the gallery window, almost the counterpoint.

Kenneth Wong stayed in Kyoto last year and shared these maps from two different hotels. He commented “Two hostels I stayed in Kyoto last Nov. Both have a gigantic city map hung near reception. Comparing the differences of their approaches to map the town and show the tourist spots would be a great cartography article” I am a R-Star fan.

Another one from Cartonaut, does anyone know who the artist is?

Charles Robbins shared this

En el marco de MundoGEO Connect 2026, se organiza la transmisión en vivo Suite gvSIG – la plataforma en software libre de gestión territorial que tendrá lugar el 29 de octubre a las 16h (hora de Buenos Aires), y se transmitirá por YouTube, Linkedin, Facebook e Instagram.

Novedades, integración con IA y casos de uso – regístrate gratis aquí para ver en directo. Yo no me lo perdería, vamos a contar cosas muy, muy interesantes sobre la evolución tecnológica de la Suite gvSIG.

Robert Simmon sent s these pics from his trip to Chile and Argentina – a lovely hand=-ainted map of the Laguna Nimez Nature Reserve in El Calafate, Argentina, paired with a small multiples chart showing the local birds. www.lagunanimez.com

GeoServer 2.27.3 release is now available with downloads (bin, war, windows), along with docs and extensions.

This is a maintenance release of GeoServer providing existing installations with minor updates and bug fixes. GeoServer 2.27.3 is made in conjunction with GeoTools 33.3, and GeoWebCache 1.27.3.

Thanks to Jody Garnett (GeoCat) for making this release.

Dave Smith spotted this – “For some reason, I find the lack of surrounding landmasses and slight rotation even more disorienting here than I would expect #mapsinthewild (also #toiletart)”

Andrew Tyrrell shared these pics, he said “Christmas Eve #MapsInTheWild on the Puffing Billy Railway in Melbourne. I wandered across this a few times and didn’t give it much thought. Then I realised it’s a minimalist map of the railway, just marking the line and the stations. A great map, but also a fantastic experience riding the train!”

We love this one

Ken didn’t think this was a map in the wild because there’s no map but there is a globe thingy os I reckon it qualifies. He said “That moment when the label on a bottle of wine does its job and makes the sale.”, what I would call a no brainer.

Following on from yesterday’s curtains here are some pics Reinder sent of the carpets in the Inntel Hotel in Utrecht. A bit dizzying but for lovers of maps in the wild, quite a treat.

Reinder shared these carto curtains from the Inntel Hotel in Utrecht

Imagine poder conversar com o seu GeoNode como se fosse um assistente técnico:

“Mostre os municípios com população acima de 50 mil.”
“Liste as camadas relacionadas a meio ambiente publicadas em 2024.”
“Quais áreas de risco estão dentro da zona urbana de Florianópolis?”

Essas consultas, que normalmente exigiriam acesso ao banco ou ao painel do GeoNode, podem ser respondidas em segundos por um chatbot integrado com IA.

A ideia deste post é mostrar como criar um assistente geoespacial inteligente, capaz de:

• Compreender perguntas em linguagem natural;
• Traduzir em chamadas à API do GeoNode (ou SQL/PostGIS);
• Retornar respostas estruturadas (tabelas, nomes de camadas, metadados, links);
• E até gerar mapas dinâmicos a partir das consultas.

1. O papel do GeoNode como fonte de conhecimento geoespacial

Doug Greenfield spotted this hand carved wooden map of Poland, Maine

Os mapas de calor (heatmaps) são uma das formas mais intuitivas de visualizar densidade de ocorrências geográficas, seja para representar crimes, atendimentos de saúde, pontos de coleta de resíduos ou eventos climáticos.

No GeoServer, podemos gerar mapas de calor usando o WMS Heatmap Rendering Transform, mas configurar isso manualmente para dezenas de camadas pode ser trabalhoso.

Neste post, vamos mostrar como automatizar esse processo com Python + IA, criando um pipeline que:

• Analisa automaticamente seus dados espaciais;
• Gera os parâmetros ideais do heatmap (raio, cores, intensidade);
• Publica o estilo e a camada automaticamente no GeoServer;
• Pode ser aplicado a qualquer dataset de pontos no PostGIS.

1. O conceito de heatmap no GeoServer

Elizabeth was enjoying this nice Argentinian wine when she noticed the cork.

The GeoServer team is making great progress on our 2025 roadmap plans, with CITE Certification Achieved, and GeoServer 3 underway, the project is going well.

Thanks to GeoServer 2025 sponsors:

We are really happy to the see the CITE Certified banner restored to the main GeoServer website for calendar year 2025. Andrea continues to work on certifying the new OGCAPI services:

• OGCAPI - Tiles: Passing tests on Team Engine 2.0 Engine

  ...

GeoServer 2.28.0 release is now available with downloads (bin, war, windows), along with docs and extensions.

This is a stable release of GeoServer, recommended for production use. GeoServer 2.28.0 is made in conjunction with GeoTools 34.0, GeoWebCache 1.28.0, ImageIO-Ext 2.0.0, and ImageN 0.9.0.

Kenneth Wong shared these pics of 6 master plans of Shanghai, from 1930 to 2017, in the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center.

The last time I preprocessed the whole GeoLife dataset, I loaded it into PostGIS. Today, I want to share a new workflow that creates a (Geo)Parquet file and that is much faster.

“This GPS trajectory dataset was collected in (Microsoft Research Asia) Geolife project by 182 users in a period of over three years (from April 2007 to August 2012). A GPS trajectory of this dataset is represented by a sequence of time-stamped points, each of which contains the information of latitude, longitude and altitude. This dataset contains 17,621 trajectories with a total distance of about 1.2 million kilometers and a total duration of 48,000+ hours. These trajectories were recorded by different GPS loggers and GPS-phones, and have a variety of sampling rates. 91 percent of the trajectories are logged in a dense representation, e.g. every 1~5 seconds or every 5~10 meters per point.”