Bert Spaan has taken Mapterhorn's global terrain data to create an interactive global Relief map. What is particularly interesting about this new map is that, unlike traditional topographic maps with a fixed colour-to-elevation scale, the map's colour spectrum adapts dynamically to the specific region or bounds currently in view.

As you pan and zoom across different landscapes, the colour grading shifts to highlight local topographic variations, producing a striking and constantly changing view of the world's mountains, valleys and plains. This works particularly well when switching between very different environments: the colour range changes to bring out the relief at the scale you're viewing, rather than leaving low-lying terrain looking uniformly flat.

Quel est le niveau de pollution de l'air dans votre ville ? De nouvelles données de la Banque mondiale suivent les concentrations quotidiennes de PM₂.₅ dans plus de 32 000 villes à travers le monde, pour la période 2018-2026. Ces données peuvent aider à identifier les zones critiques et à surveiller l'évolution de la qualité de l'air urbain

1) Types de polluants et finalités de la surveillance atmosphérique

Mardi 13 octobre 2026, de 19h à 21h, Café de Flore, salle du premier étage, 172 boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris

Mardi 13 octobre 2026, notre deuxième café géo de la saison 2026-2027 accueillera le géographe Jean Rieucau qui viendra présenter la géohistoire de Montmartre au moment de son âge d’or artistique entre 1875 et 1918.

Les médias parlent « d’âge d’or », de légende, d’esprit des lieux. De leur côté, les géographes du tourisme ont forgé le concept de « moment de lieu » pour caractériser certains lieux qui incarnent des situations de portée générale, quasi universelle. Ainsi le quartier de Montparnasse, à partir de 1920 durant les Années folles, puis celui de Saint-Germain-des-Prés à partir de la Libération, succèderont à la butte Montmartre comme « moments de lieux » artistiques parisiens.

Much has been written about how this year's El Niño is already breaking records. Climate Dashboard's new interactive map lets you explore how this unusually strong El Niño could affect climate conditions around the world, including what it might mean for the weather where you live.

El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon in which unusually warm ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific disrupt atmospheric circulation, shifting rainfall and temperature patterns around the world. These effects can mean wetter conditions in some regions and drought in others.

Sure, Open Science has gained some momentum during the last decade. The Horizon Europe programme supports a number of open infrastructure projects, one of them being AquaINFRA, and the next call is already out. The German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) has just announced that funding will continue until 2038. And let’s not forget the local initiatives in universities, such as Open Science Communities, reproducibility networks, and research data management centers. We also talked about 52°North’s efforts in our blog post on Lire la suite →

La Terre n'est pas une sphère parfaite : la NASA a révélé le 15 juillet 2026 un nouveau modèle 3D de la planète. Cette nouvelle représentation de la Terre est bien loin de l'image d'une sphère lisse et brillante (la Bille bleue) que l'on voit d'habitude sur les photographies prises depuis l'espace.

A long-standing feature request in the QGIS repo has been an option for a ribbon-style GUI to replace the plethora of toolbars that usually characterize the top rows of any QGIS window.

A couple of months ago Eithan published an experimental “Ribbon Toolbar” plugin for QGIS 3 that implemented a first version of this idea.

I recently picked up the threads, ported the plugin to QGIS 4 and continued refining the structure of the tabs and ribbons, cleaning up truncated labels, design logical groups, and making icons for the most commonly used functions (based on my subjective experience, not objectively measured) large / more prominent:

Voir la transcription ci-dessous

L’outil « Mesurer une distance » permet de dessiner une ligne sur la carte et d’en connaître en temps réel la longueur.

Cliquez sur l’icône de l’outil :

Vous pouvez alors cliquer sur la carte pour commencer à créer la ligne. Chaque nouveau clic permet d’ajouter un sommet supplémentaire à la ligne :

Voir la transcription ci-dessous

Le catalogue de cartes est l’outil principal du service « Explorer les cartes ». Cliquez sur l’icône suivante pour l’ouvrir :

Il vous permet de naviguer parmi l’ensemble des cartes publiées depuis la Géoplateforme.

Voir la transcription ci-dessous

Une fois votre carte sélectionnée depuis le catalogue de cartes, elle apparaitra dans le « Gestionnaire de couches ». Il s’agit de l’outil permettant de manipuler les données sélectionnées, de les organiser, les superposer et de gérer leur apparence.

Le chiffre indiqué sur l’icône vous indique combien de couches contient le gestionnaire de couches. Une fois ouvert, il ressemble à ceci :

Chaque couche dispose d’outils qui auront une action sur celle-ci.

Printing in MapStore and GeoNode still relies on an ageing integration with MapFish Print 2, built around a single map. Dashboards, GeoStories and multi-page documents cannot be printed properly.

This year we built a working prototype of a new Print Composer: design the page, preview it live, print it. Maps, dashboards, GeoStories and atlases with one page per feature, rendered by a new open-source print engine built on GeoTools. You can see it in action in the 5-minute demo.

Atlas mode: one layout, one page per feature. Watch the full demo on YouTube.

There are lots of 3D maps that visualize the tens of thousands of human-made satellites orbiting the Earth, such as SatelliteeXplorer and James Darpinian's See a Satellite Tonight, which uses Google's Street View imagery to show you exactly where to look in the night sky if you want to watch a satellite passing overhead.

Perigee takes a rather broader view of humanity's presence in space. As well as visualizing thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth, this impressive 3D viewer lets you explore spacecraft orbiting the Moon and Mars, and even track probes travelling through the wider Solar System.

Bosphore 1819 is an interactive version of a beautiful 1819 topographical map of the Bosphorus. The original Plan Topographique du Bosphore de Thrace ou Canal de Constantinople et de ses environs was surveyed by François Kauffer between 1776 and 1786, before being redrawn and expanded by Jean-Denis Barbié du Bocage and published in 1819.

The original map is wonderfully detailed, but navigating it isn't particularly easy - particularly if you can't speak or read French. Hundreds of villages, palaces, fortifications, streams, capes and other landmarks are labelled using French spellings of Ottoman Turkish names. Bosphore 1819 turns all those labels into a database that can be searched using the modern place-names of the region.

This post provides a recap of the security advisories published over the summer of 2026, covering recently published Common Vulnerability and Exploits (CVE), along with a supply chain advisory affecting the GeoServer project. This activity has resulted in an update to our security policy covering AI-assisted vulnerability reports.

If you are responsible for a GeoServer instance, the short version is: please update to GeoServer 3.0.1, GeoServer 2.28.5, or GeoServer 2.27.6.

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[1] Une carte de l’Ohio mettant en évidence les limites de 1 309 cantons. | OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles | Données cartographiques © cartographes OpenStreetMap.

...

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Le groupe local Nancy de l’association OpenStreetMap France vous propose de participer aux réunions mensuelles ouvertes à tou·te·s !

Avec OpenStreetMap, participez à la construction d’une carte en ligne libre et gratuite, partagée avec le monde entier!

Le lieu la Fabrique des possibles nous est librement accessible lors de nos réunions.

You would think that interactive mapping platforms are the perfect tool for building territory expansion games. However, I can think of very few good map conquest games.

There are a few popular 'Risk'-type games, such as War.app, that involve claiming and conquering territories on a map. There have also been a few 'Monopoly'-type games, such as Upland, that involve buying and selling virtual real estate on an interactive map tied directly to actual addresses in major global cities.

InkDom, however, may be the territory-grabbing game that we have all been waiting for. It turns the real world into a giant game board where you can draw a loop around your neighbourhood and claim everything inside it as your own. Even better, you also claim the people who live there.

Avant de commencer vos modifications, pensez à effectuer les étapes préalables indiquées page précédente. Vous éviterez ainsi d’éventuels conflits.

À la suite de l’installation de VS Code, vous pouvez prévisualiser l’écriture de contenu de plusieurs facons. Néanmoins, cette prévisualisation n’englobera pas les composants DSFR. Il faudra déployer le site en local pour avoir une image complète de prévisualisation (cf. page précédente).

Cliquez sur le bouton de prévisualisation (ou utilisez les raccourcis claviers Crtl + K puis V) :

There are plenty of maps that show you where the world's lighthouses are. Lighthouses, live does something much more interesting: it shows you how they actually work. Instead of just showing each lighthouse as a static point on a map this map gives you a sense of what its light signal actually looks like at sea.

Lighthouses, live plots charted coastal lights on a dark, night-time relief map and animates each one according to its real-world light characteristics. Some lights sweep continuously across the sea, while others flash in distinctive sequences, with the timing and colour of each beam taken from nautical charts. Impressively, terrain data is also used to block the light based on the surrounding topography, so you can actually see how each lighthouse's beam is constrained by the coastline and landscape.

Source : Kerra Maddern, Two centuries on, experts unlock secrets of Red Sea and Gulf of Aden sailing chart [Deux siècles plus tard, des experts dévoilent les secrets de la carte de navigation de la mer Rouge et du golfe d'Aden], University of Exeter, 2 juillet 2026.

Thanks to Zachary DeBottis

I am fascinated by what3words, it defies the laws of finance that apply to most businesses and shows how little my old fashioned understanding of business models is relevant in the modern tech economy.

The idea of a verbal description of a 3m square as a proxy for coordinates might have sounded like a good idea a decade ago but adoption seems to have been slow and new technology may be about to overtake the idea.

Depuis la rentrée 2023, les temps de rencontre autour d'OpenStreetMap sont relancés.

L'occasion de se rencontrer (ou de se retrouver), d'échanger sur OpenStreetMap et de lancer des projets en commun.

I recently featured New York in 1.67 Million Buildings - a building age map created by Block and Paper, who have developed similar animated timelines for 80 other US cities and lots of other cities around the world.

One of those other cities is Los Angeles. However, if you want an even wider perspective, Parcelscope's Every Building in Los Angeles County lets you view an animated construction history for the entire county. Their map visualizes nearly 3 million buildings constructed since 1880.

NEOGEO franchit une nouvelle étape avec le lancement de OneGeo Suite en version SaaS. Les entreprises et collectivités peuvent désormais accéder à une plateforme complète de gestion, de publication et de valorisation de leurs données géographiques directement depuis un cloud souverain sans avoir à installer ni administrer leur propre infrastructure. 

Depuis plusieurs années, la solution OneGeo Suite accompagne les acteurs publics et privés dans la gestion et la valorisation de leurs données géographiques. 

Elle s’appuie sur des technologies open source, une architecture modulaire et évolutive, les standards OGC et la directive Inspire afin de favoriser l’interopérabilité et la pérennité des plateformes. 

L'Europe se trouve à un tournant : la population de l'UE a connu une croissance continue pendant des décennies, atteignant environ 450 millions d'habitants en 2025. Cependant, les experts prévoient que cette tendance s'inversera bientôt. Ils estiment que le pic sera atteint vers 2029, après quoi la population diminuera progressivement. Ils anticipent que cette évolution variera considérablement d'une région à l'autre et que les migrations ne compenseront pas le déclin persistant du taux de natalité. La qualité de vie dans les zones rurales est menacée.

1) Une série chronologique exceptionnelle sur l'évolution démographique au niveau de l'UE

Rendez-vous dans votre tableau de bord en cliquant sur votre profil en haut à droite de la page.

Dans la partie « Espaces de travail », vous pourrez faire une « Demande de création d’un espace de travail », ou bien « Rejoindre un espace de travail existant » :

Si l’entrepôt que vous souhaitez rejoindre est public, vous pourrez le rechercher dans la liste :

Vous pouvez ajouter un message optionnel à votre demande :

Cartes.gouv.fr est une interface qui se base sur l’infrastructure Géoplateforme. Ainsi, un compte personnel cartes.gouv.fr est en réalité un compte Géoplateforme.

Tout d’abord, cliquez sur « Se connecter » dans l’en-tête de la page :

Si vous ne possédez pas encore de compte Géoplateforme, ciquez sur « Pas encore de compte » :

These are the countries of the world as drawn by over 3,000 people on the Borderline country border game.

The object of Borderline is very simple. You are shown a map without borders and asked to draw the outline of a named country. You are then scored on the accuracy of your drawn border.  The scoring appears to be based on two measures of accuracy. The game calculates how far the real border is, on average, from your drawn line. The game also compares the length of your line with the actual length of the country's land border (drawing substantially more line than the real border can therefore hurt your score).

Open Science is about increasing the transparency, reproducibility, and reusability of research results. It touches upon data, software, infrastructure, Open Access to scientific papers and many other aspects relevant throughout the research process. However, for some reason (some people refer to the strong commercialization of scientific journals), Open Science used to be a niche topic and sharing research outputs was not the norm. Who hasn’t read about the infamous “We will share data upon request”? Fortunately, for more than a decade now, there has been a movement towards more openness; whether it’s the European Open Science Cloud, national initiatives like NFDI, or conferences pushing for more reproducibility like AGILE. UNESCO even released a whole Recommendation on Open Science a few years ago (see Fig. 1), which also considered societal aspects (e.g., Open engagement, Open dialogue) in addition to techn...

L'Allemagne traverse une période de bouleversements politiques majeurs suite aux élections régionales de septembre 2026, marquées par des percées historiques de l'extrême droite et de la gauche radicale :

• En Saxe-Anhalt : l'AfD a provoqué un véritable séisme politique en enregistrant son meilleur résultat historique avec environ 44 % des voix.
• Au Mecklembourg et en Poméranie-Occidentale : l'AfD (extrême droite) est arrivée en tête du scrutin avec un score historique de 38,2 % des voix.
• À Berlin : la gauche radicale (Die Linke) a remporté les élections dans la capitale. L'AfD y réalise également une progression en obtenant plus de 16 % des suffrages.

From November 3 to 5, 2026, GeoSolutions will be at Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, Fira Gran Via, as part of the Italian Pavilion organised by ITA, the Italian Trade Agency. You will find Eleonora Fontana and the GeoSolutions team in Hall 2, Stand C161. If you are planning to attend and want to talk about geoportals, urban digital twins or open data infrastructure for your city, write to sales@geosolutionsgroup.com and we will book a slot at the stand.

After I had finished categorising all the posts on Mappery (see this post) it occurred to me that a similar strategy might be used for geocoding ungeocoded posts. If you have been following my vibe coding posts you will know that Arnaud and I built a geocoding and mapping plugin for our WordPress site that we are about to publish.

« À quelle distance se trouve réellement l'hôpital le plus proche en Espagne ? » (The Conversation).

Since January 2025, the United States has deported at least 25,447 people to countries that are not their own. According to The Guardian those deported 'include those who spent most of their lives in the US, parents detained on the school run, (and) the adult children of elderly relatives who depend on them for care.'

The Deportation Project Map lets you explore the Trump administration's global network of deportations. Click on a country on the map and you can see the number of people who have been deported there alongside a breakdown of the nationalities of those who have been deported.

L’information bâtimentaire de la BD TOPO® a été initialisée dans les années 1990 à partir des anciennes bases de données cartographiques et mise à niveau en 2010 avec les données du parcellaire cadastral (Plan Cadastral Informatisé) dans le but d’être interopérable avec les autres référentiels IGN.

La mise à jour des emprises au sol du bâti est désormais effectuée majoritairement par restitution photogrammétrique à partir des images aériennes acquises par l’IGN (une trentaine de départements volés par an), ce qui permet de cartographier de manière quasi exhaustive tous les bâtiments ayant une emprise au sol de plus de 20 m² tous les 3 ans. La BD TOPO® est aussi entretenue avec des bases locales de référence produites par des collectivités comme l’Eurométropole de Strasbourg ou la Métropole européenne de Lille.

Cette offre est clôturée, les candidatures ne seront plus analysées à partir du 28 Septembre 2026.

Oslandia est une société de services en informatique spécialisée dans les logiciels de système d’information géographique opensource. Nous travaillons avec une excellence technique, pour améliorer les solutions SIG Opensource, afin de fournir des solutions pertinentes à nos clients et valoriser les données géographiques. Nous avons une structure efficiente avec un business model OpenSource prouvé, et un impact sur les technologies et la société.

Oslandia recherche un·e assistant·e administration des ventes à temps plein, en télétravail.

This animated map shows the movement of the land that now makes up the United States (outlined in red) over the course of 540 million years. It was recorded from the Pangea Map, a new interactive map that “lets you explore 540 million years of continental drift, from the Cambrian explosion all the way to the present day”.

Maps such as Esri's Dance of the Continents, GPlates and Ancient Earth Globe already allow you to explore how the Earth has changed over time through shifting plate tectonics and continental drift.

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[1] Géolocalisation de données textuelles | © Illustration DLR | Données cartographiques © contributeurs et contributrices OpenStreetMap

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Prezado leitor,

O intuito do post de hoje é que você aprenda como integrar o GeoServer a um servidor LDAP, autenticar usuários, transformar grupos LDAP em roles e preparar essas roles para utilização nas regras de segurança do GeoServer. O laboratório utiliza GeoServer 3, OpenLDAP e Docker Compose.

Em instalações simples do GeoServer é comum administrar usuários diretamente pela interface da aplicação. Esse modelo funciona bem em laboratórios, treinamentos e ambientes pequenos. Em ambientes corporativos, porém, normalmente a organização já possui uma infraestrutura centralizada de identidade. É nesse cenário que entra o LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).

Em vez de manter usuários e senhas dentro do próprio GeoServer, podemos integrá-lo a um diretório LDAP e utilizar os usuários e grupos existentes na organização. A arquitetura passa a ser semelhante a esta:

Since 2012, the London Legacy Development Corporation has gradually transformed the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park from an essential local green space into a high-density residential hub driven by foreign investment. The before-and-after aerial imagery above provides a striking illustration of how the landscape of the Olympic 'park' is being built over.

This before and after image was created in a matter of seconds by GeoWhisperer. GeoWhisperer is a new tool from Henk van Ess that attempts to take some of the guesswork out of comparing satellite imagery. Designed for OSINT researchers, journalists and visual mappers, it automatically searches historical satellite imagery and uses AI to identify physical changes between different dates.

Une nouvelle version de la cartographie nationale des ouvrages et aménagements littoraux (édition 2026) est disponible sur GéoLittoral. Réalisée par le Cerema, avec le soutien du ministère chargé de la Transition écologique, cette cartographie recense les principaux ouvrages et aménagements présents le long du front de mer, dans l’Hexagone, en Corse et dans les départements et régions d’outre-mer.

For a while now, my preferred way of installing QGIS has been from conda-forge. However, while we’re waiting for QGIS 4 to become available on conda-forge, there are alternatives:

Option 1: Flatpak

In the Software Manager, you can find QGIS from Flathub in two different versions: stable and lts. And stable should give you 4.2 (even if the Software Manager preview shows an older one):

Option 2: Meet the official QGIS Docker Images

On the Mappery site we have almost 2,400 posts on WordPress and we had never used the Category feature to sort them when we were adding posts. When we built the new Mappery Map Plugin for WordPress we included the option to only map posts in a specific category which we thought would be useful to some users in the future.Yesterday afternoon I wanted to see if there was a smart way to categorise 2,400 posts without stepping through each one in the WordPress edit interface which would have required time and dedication that I didn’t have!

I started out with this prompt:

During the Last Glacial Maximum, the European landscape looked radically unrecognizable compared to today. Enormous ice sheets flattened Northern Europe, global sea levels dropped dramatically, and the sheer weight of the ice compressed Earth's crust downward by hundreds of meters.

Europe Under the Ice is an impressive interactive mapped visualization that tracks these massive geophysical changes step-by-step from 24,100 BC all the way to the present day. Press play on the map and you can watch the ice sheets spread and retreat across Northern Europe over the millennia.

Le GRAOULUG, avec le BUG-Metz (Blender Users Group) et le Groupe OpenStreetMap Metz participeront aux 2 journées Makerland Metz 2026 (3000 à 4000 visiteurs attendus).

À cette occasion nous mettront en avant Linux et les Logiciels Libres incluant les logiciels graphiques et tout l'éco système OpenStreetMap. Les visiteurs pourront avoir un aperçu de Linux et des Logiciels Libres sur différents PC sur notre stand et prendre connaissance de nos prochaines install party et ateliers logiciels graphiques et Openstreetmap.

Nous sommes également partenaires de l'Arob@se, espace numérique des médiathèques de Metz. Ils  ne pourront pas être présent cette année sur notre stand mais nous diffuseront leurs informations.

Source : « Limiter le dépassement – ​​Gérer le dépassement de 1,5 °C et les voies de retour » (Rapport du PNUE, septembre 2026)

Yesterday I gave a talk at Geomob London on my adventures in vibe coding. The slides are pretty but probably don’t tell the whole story unless you have been reading my regular posts on my projects.

The images in the slides are all cartoons of an old dog learning new tricks and got some praise, the way I made them was interesting, so i thought I would post about it.

I started out by building an empty slide deck on Google Slides, each slide had a title and a few had a handful of words, they all had spaces for an image. I asked Claude:

Maps such as Pack Lightly's Best Time to Travel and Find the Best Time to Travel translate complex historical weather data into interactive heatmaps. By taking the guesswork out of trip timing, they make it easy to either match a destination with its optimal season or discover which parts of the world offer ideal weather for your travel dates.

For travelers who want deeper control over their planning, SeasonMap takes climate-based travel visualization a step further. Rather than relying on simple, static temperature averages, SeasonMap converts multi-source climate data into dynamic, activity-specific comfort scores (0–100) mapped globally for every month.

En mai 2026, le site Statistique publique de l'Energie, des Transports, du Logement et de l'Environnement (SDES) a mis en ligne son rapport Bilan environnemental de la France - Édition 2025. Publiés depuis 2020, ces bilans annuels font un état de l'environnement en France et donnent les tendances et indicateurs clés en matière d'environnement.

1) Principaux résultats 

Les activités économiques, sources de pressions sur l’environnement

When Ed challenged me to make a map of Geomob Events on a podcast, I jumped in scraped the data and produced quite a nice map despite fighting a battle with Gemini to extract the data for the map from the markdown files of the Geomob website. The problem, as Ed pointed out retrospectively was that the events map was going to be difficult to maintain as further events got scheduled, it was very much a snapshot at a point in time and my suggestion that someone could edit the json file of events was not very practical.

I recently reviewed the Movie Scene Map, an interactive map that makes it easy to find which iconic movie scenes were filmed right around the corner from your house.

However, the fact that a film was shot near you doesn't necessarily mean that the movie is set in your neighborhood. In many cases, filmmakers use one location to stand in for another, either because it's cheaper, more convenient, or simply looks the part.

For example, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, while set almost entirely in the moody, nocturnal streets of Greenwich Village and Manhattan, was shot almost entirely in London. Even more astonishingly, London was also used to create some of the iconic, sweat-soaked Vietnam jungle scenes in Full Metal Jacket.

20 years of 52°North! What a brilliant opportunity to reflect a little. Time to look back in time? Nah, Albert Remke, co-founder of 52°North, already did this successfully in his blog post 52°North – 20 Years of Exploring Horizons. So, shall we take a look ahead instead? Honestly, with the constant changes brought on by AI, predicting the next year is anyone’s guess. How about reflecting a bit on what we do right now?

At 52°North, we design and develop open-source software and infrastructure solutions with a geospatial background. Clear enough? No? Yeah, we get it, it sounds pretty abstract and generic. So how can we describe our services more specifically and showcase the ambitions we share with our partners from research and beyond? In other words:

What are the key challenges 52°North aims to address,

Dear Reader,

We are back from FOSS4G 2026 in Hiroshima, Japan, and we want to share what we presented and what we brought home. With up to 14 parallel tracks, this year's global edition was dense: two days of workshops, three days of talks, and plenty of conversations at the booth.

GeoSolutions attended with one representative per product line: Andrea Aime for GeoServer, Lorenzo Natali for MapStore and Stefano Bovio for GeoNode. Together they delivered 5 workshops and 14 presentations, and GeoSolutions supported the event as a sponsor, continuing our long-standing commitment to the OSGeo community and to open geospatial standards.