“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you might find
You get what you need” (Rolling Stones, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Album: Let it Bleed, 1969)

I had an idea for a map – where did all of the non native plants in Britain come from? I thought there might be something interesting there if I could find the data and map it.

I called up my new friend Claude and asked for some help with the data “is there a dataset that shows common flower and shrub species found in great britain and their country of origin (possibly with some historical narrative of how they arrived in the uk)?” That took me to the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew’s “BIFloraExplorer” with over 3000 species in Britain and the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s “Plant Atlas 2020” – loads of time saved, I had some authoritative and relevant data in minutes.

Unusually mild weather helped make week five productive. I can feel the benefits as I write this, a week later.

• 11 hours, 37 minutes all training

• 19.3 miles running

• 1,890 ft D+ running

Tuesday I did hill sprints on the "Wallenberg Wall" in my neighborhood. My cadence has increased, and I was a second faster on average. 23 seconds instead of 24. Getting faster is one of my goals, and I'm making measurable progress.

This new version is compatible with QGIS 4 (based on Qt 6 framework). 

Until QGIS 4 is officially released, in order to try the new Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin you can install the prerelease (QGIS 3.99 master).

The NDFF (Nationale Databank Flora & Fauna) holds over 200 million verified observations of plant and animal species from the Netherlands. These data are contributed by volunteers and professionals from hundreds of organizations. Together they contain a wealth of information about the occurrence of plant and animal species in the Netherlands.  Since 2025, the database is accessible to everyone free of charge. That means that one can download all data for 5 × 5 km grid cells (certain restrictions apply). 

Observations are provided as polygons. This post provides an example of how to quickly create summary raster maps showing the total number of observed species. Non-native species are excluded to focus on native biodiversity patterns. Moreover, each record is treated as a single observations regardless of the reported number of individuals. 

What does it mean to speak about European digital infrastructure? It means:

• Use of open standards (such as those promoted by the Open Geospatial Consortium).
• Compliance with regulatory frameworks such as INSPIRE.
• A real possibility of self-hosting.
• Independence from unilateral changes in licenses or terms of use.
• The ability to audit, evolve, and adapt the system over the long term.

Europe has clearly defined its commitment to the digital commons and technological sovereignty.
But that strategy is not materialized through declarations. It is materialized through real infrastructures.

¿Qué significa hablar de infraestructura digital europea? Significa:

• Uso de estándares abiertos (como los promovidos por el Open Geospatial Consortium).
• Cumplimiento de marcos normativos como la directiva INSPIRE.
• Posibilidad real de autohospedaje.
• Independencia frente a cambios unilaterales de licencias o condiciones de uso.
• Capacidad de auditar, evolucionar y adaptar el sistema a largo plazo.

Europa ha definido claramente su apuesta por el bien común digital y la soberanía tecnológica. Pero esa estrategia no se concreta en declaraciones. Se concreta en infraestructuras reales.

We are happy to announce that GeoServer 3 is approaching general availability with a target release date of 15th of April 2026.

This major upgrade modernises the platform’s foundation with the migration to Spring 7 and JDK 17, brings a refreshed user experience and replaces legacy image-processing components with ImageN to deliver significantly improved raster performance and maintainability. The release aligns GeoServer with current Java ecosystems, strengthens security and vulnerability management, and simplifies cloud-native deployments. You can read more about the GeoServer 3 initiative on this page.

No maps in this post!

I mentor a couple of people and I was about to start a new project this week. I was going to knock up a Google Sheet or Doc to track goals, talks and meetings and share with the mentee and my co-mentor. It occurred to me that I could vibe code an app to track the mentee’s progress and to provide structure to our regular meetings.

With a lot of help from Claude I’ve got something running that does that for a few mentors and mentees, it runs on desktop and mobile and quite a lot of the input is voice to text which is particularly useful in mobile. It took about 3 hours, to build test and deploy.

I am sure that I’ll find some problems or feature gaps in the future but that doesn’t matter in my use case. I don’t plan to build this into a business or to scale it up to thousands of users it’s just a tool that makes record keeping for me and my mentees easier.

IOSACal 0.7 was released yesterday. Here is a quick summary of what’s new.

This long cycle was mostly about documentation improvements and some maintenance tasks, the boring but essential work that keeps the project going.

Version 0.7 is already available in PyPI and conda-forge. There is an updated version record at Zenodo.

All changes were contributed by Stefano Costa.

Die FOSSGIS-Konferenz 2026 findet vom 25.-28. März 2026 in Göttingen und Online statt. Es sind nur noch wenige Wochen bis zur Konferenz. Die Vorfreude wächst stetig und die Vorbereitungen laufen auf Hochtouren!

Die Konferenz wird vom gemeinnützigen FOSSGIS e.V, der OpenStreetMap Community in Kooperation mit dem Geographischen Institut der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen organisiert und findet auf dem Campus der Uni Göttingen statt.

Auch in diesem Jahr zeichnet sich ein großes Interesse an der Konferenz ab. Die Anmeldungen steigen von Woche zu Woche. Zum Glück bietet das Zentrale Hörsaalgebäude der Uni Göttingen ausreichend Platz, so dass es die bisher größte FOSSGIS-Konferenz werden könnte.

• Added optional dependency Pandas for performance improvement in tabular data.
• In tool “Band classification” added option for using PyTorch pretrained model. In case a pretrained model is selected, and additional algorithm is selected for classification, using the same parameters of the named algorithm (e.g. random forest); after executing the pretrained model, the additional algorithm is executed on the embeddings for classification. Currently, it works with models pretrained by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SatlasPretrain: https://satlas-pretrain.allen.ai) in particular, Sentinel-2 swin-v2-base single-image multispectral and swin-v...

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!

Throughout the first month of 2026, our ninjas added a nifty set of improvements to three useful plugins that we love: the GeoMapFish Search, OpenStreetMap Nominatim Search, and OSRM Routing plugins. These plugins all provide genuinely useful functionalities as well as being great showcases of how easy it is to integrate QField with online REST endpoints.

All three plugins have been updated to ship with useful endpoint presets out of the box, and users also have the option to configure their own custom endpoints for more flexibility. To configure endpoints, open QField’s settings panel, navigate to the plugin manager, and click the settings button next to the desired plugin.

Se você trabalha com GIS/QGIS e ainda depende de cliques, processos manuais e retrabalho, chegou a hora de mudar isso.

Estão abertas as inscrições para o Curso Python com GIS do Zero, uma formação técnica e prática para quem quer sair do modo operacional e começar a programar o geoprocessamento de verdade.

Aqui você aprende Python aplicado ao GIS, não Python genérico.

O que você vai dominar:

Python do zero com foco técnico
Pandas e Geopandas aplicados ao GIS
Processamento de vetores e rasters (GDAL/OGR)
Análises espaciais e estatísticas zonais
SQL Espacial moderno com DuckDB Spatial
Automação de processos no QGIS
Introdução ao desenvolvimento de plugins

Tudo aplicado a problemas reais, como acontece no mercado.

Para quem é este curso?

Click on the image above to view Dead Reckoning v2

A couple of weeks ago I finished my Dead Reckoning V1 app and I was pretty pleased with it, all the gigs that the Dead had played summarised and displayed along with set lists, sound tracks and more. I released it just before Geomob and got some good feedback so a few days later I decided to publicise it to the Grateful Dead community on Reddit, then the storm broke!

La nueva versión 2.7 de gvSIG Desktop incluye una nueva calculadora de campos, cuyas principales ventajas son, por un lado, que se pueden rellenar varios campos a la vez, y por otro, que ha mejorado significativamente el rendimiento cuando se pretenden rellenar muchos registros a la vez, al no cargarse en memoria todos ellos sino por bloques.

La nueva calculadora se basa en la herramienta de actualizar tabla que se había incluido en la versión anterior, donde se había mejorado la parte de rellenado de registros. Ahora dispone de una pestaña “Opciones” donde se puede seleccionar el número de registros en los que se quiere que termine edición y reinicie. De esa forma no carga todos los datos en memoria y no bloquea el equipo, evitando así también posibles pérdidas de datos.

En muchas ocasiones, hablar de software libre o de código abierto en proyectos públicos se asocia a innovación. Y aunque es cierto que el acceso al conocimiento permite innovar de forma más eficiente en muchos ámbitos, también suele interpretarse como una apuesta por soluciones alternativas o incluso de riesgo.

Si nunca lo fue, hoy todavía menos: esa lectura ya no encaja con la realidad.

Cada vez más, el verdadero riesgo no está en el software libre. Está en la dependencia.

It’s our pleasure to share our first Documentation and Infrastructure Report with highlights ranging across documentation, web infrastructure, and community-facing work. While this blog post provides a brief summary and team introduction, you can find the full report here.

Click on the image above to view Dead Reckoning

This could be a long post because this was an ambitious project that was full of challenges and there are a few learnings, but first a bit of context.

A friend turned me on to the Grateful Dead in 1969, one listen to Live Dead and I was hooked. I still think the transition from Dark Star to St. Stephen is one of the most sublime bits of music ever. When the Dead came to England in 1972 I managed to get to most of their London gigs and made the journey to Bickershaw for the longest performance I have ever seen, I think it ran out at nearly 5 hours!

We are living in a time when almost every territorial project is presented alongside concepts such as artificial intelligence, digital twins or advanced analytics. The message is appealing: prediction, automation, intelligent decision-making.

But there is a less visible and far more decisive reality:
these systems only work properly when data is well structured.

AI applied to territorial management does not just require large volumes of information. It requires data that is coherent, comparable and maintainable over time. This is where standards come into play.

Los mapas en papel son planos, las pantallas en las que vemos Google Maps también lo son. Y nadie duda de su admirable exactitud. En cambio, nos dicen que la tierra es redonda… sospechoso, ¿no? ¡Hemos vivido en una mentira toda la vida! Ellos nos engañan.

¿Pero quiénes son ellos?

Los mapas, naturalmente.

Porque resulta que la Tierra no es plana, pero tampoco es perfectamente redonda, y comprender cómo describimos su forma es el primer paso para entender la cartografía moderna, la navegación o el funcionamiento del GPS.

La Tierra es una realidad única, pero existen distintos modelos para representarla: desde su superficie real, hasta los mapas planos que utilizamos a diario.

Vivimos un momento en el que casi cualquier proyecto territorial se presenta asociado a conceptos como inteligencia artificial, gemelos digitales o analítica avanzada. El mensaje es atractivo: predicción, automatización, toma de decisiones inteligente.

Pero hay una realidad menos visible y mucho más determinante:
estos sistemas solo funcionan bien si los datos están bien estructurados.

La IA aplicada al territorio no necesita únicamente grandes volúmenes de información. Necesita datos coherentes, comparables y mantenibles en el tiempo. Y ahí es donde entran en juego los estándares.

In many countries and regions, public administrations are revising their urban planning and land-use legislation with a shared goal: to simplify procedures, reduce administrative burdens, and adapt territorial management to an increasingly complex and dynamic reality.

The Valencian Community (Spain) is a recent example of this process, with the promotion of a new Land Law based on a widely shared diagnosis: excessively long procedures, documentary overload, duplication of information, and difficulties in coordinating data across departments and administrations. A situation that, to a greater or lesser extent, is repeated in many other territories.

En muchos países y regiones, las administraciones públicas están revisando su legislación urbanística y territorial con un objetivo común: simplificar procedimientos, reducir cargas administrativas y adaptar la gestión del territorio a una realidad cada vez más compleja y dinámica.

La Comunitat Valenciana es un ejemplo reciente de este proceso, con el impulso de una nueva Ley del Suelo que parte de un diagnóstico ampliamente compartido: procedimientos excesivamente largos, sobrecarga documental, duplicidades y dificultades para coordinar información entre departamentos y administraciones. Un escenario que, en mayor o menor medida, se repite en muchos otros territorios.

Ya desde los inicios de la red de autónomos que fue el germen de Geomático, teníamos la costumbre de hacer, todos los años, al menos una reunión presencial de todo el equipo. Para quienes trabajáis en empresas cien por cien en remoto, sabéis lo importante que es juntarse y convivir con otros humanos.

En Geomático, además, al ser una cooperativa, aprovechamos la ocasión para realizar lo que legalmente es nuestra Asamblea Ordinaria. En nuestro caso, utilizamos este evento tanto para la toma de decisiones que requieren el debate de todas las personas socias como para lo que comúnmente llamamos “frikear” un poco.

Durante todo este tiempo, cuando se acercaban estas fechas, elegíamos dónde queríamos vernos y nos poníamos a buscar alojamiento. Hace cuatro años decidimos que nos reuniríamos en Segovia y, durante la búsqueda, dimos con Duermevela.

For years, at gvSIG we have insisted on a concept that was often dismissed as ideological, romantic, or even naïve: technological sovereignty.

Today, in a context marked by geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruptions, and structural dependence on external technologies, this concept has moved beyond academic debate to become a strategic necessity.

Europe imports around 80% of its digital infrastructure and technologies. This is not only an economic issue: it is a political, operational, and democratic vulnerability. We depend on decisions taken outside our legal frameworks, our interests, and, in many cases, our values.

Durante años, en gvSIG hemos insistido en un concepto que muchas veces se despachaba como ideológico, romántico o incluso ingenuo: la soberanía tecnológica.
Hoy, en pleno contexto de tensiones geopolíticas, disrupciones en las cadenas de suministro y dependencia estructural de tecnologías externas, ese concepto ha dejado de ser un debate académico para convertirse en una necesidad estratégica.

Europa importa alrededor del 80 % de su infraestructura y tecnología digital. Esto no es solo una cuestión económica: es una vulnerabilidad política, operativa y democrática. Dependemos de decisiones tomadas fuera de nuestro marco legal, de nuestros intereses y, en muchos casos, de nuestros valores.

We’re genuinely excited to co-organise the upcoming QGIS User Conference together with QGIS User Group Switzerland, and to do so in Laax, right here in the Swiss Alps.

Laax is home to OPENGIS.ch and the place where QField was born. It is a setting that has shaped how we work, how we collaborate, and how we think about building open-source tools that are meant to be used in the real world.

Bringing the global QGIS community together in such a place feels just right. People and ideas come together around open source, with space to exchange, reflect, and collaborate, in an environment that mirrors values that are deeply rooted in our DNA and our close connection to nature.