Welcome to the fourth issue of Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spa

July 7 · Issue #4 · View online

Welcome to the fourth issue of Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spatial community. Each issue I’ll highlight the most interesting and inspiring things that I’ve found — cool demos, new tools, tutorials, beautiful maps, interviews, behind-the-scenes and more. You can find the previous issues here

It’s that time again — time for your weekly helping of spatial goodies. This week was a hard one as there were so many interesting things to include. The good news is that the next issue is already half-way complete as a result! We also managed to surpass 1,000 subscribers since the last issue went out — and then some! I’m hoping to do something fun to celebrate this huge milestone, so watch this space. In the meantime, please continue to share the newsletter with your friends and colleagues. These issues take a long time for me to put together and the more people we can get involved the more interesting we can make it for everyone. 🙏 So as always, sit back and join me on this periodic journey through the world of maps. And remember, you can unsubscribe at any point if you’re not finding this useful. One last thing — you can reply directly to me via this email if you have content suggestions, questions, or just want to say hi. Lots of you have done this so far. Don’t be shy! 👋 — Robin Hawkes ( @robhawkes

Maps

Historic sea ice extents www.esri.com – Share This hypnotic map by John Nelson shows the seasonal ebb and flow of sea ice as it freezes and thaws over the past 40 years. He also looks at alternative methods of visualising the same data to explore how sea-ice extents have changed in 40 years.

Crater Lake in monochrome twitter.com – Share This beautiful monochrome map from Lauren Tierney contains all sorts of interesting details and techniques. I’m particularly fond of the text and the transparency effect towards the edges of the map. Very nice! 👌

Have you made an interesting map recently? I’d like to highlight more maps from the subscriber community. Don’t be shy! Either reply to this email or contact me on Twitter

Odds and ends

Colouring London beta.colouring.london – Share The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) has released their Colouring London project, which attempts to use crowd-sourcing to collect information on every building in London. So far the collected area is small, though this will likely change as more people get involved. I’m curious to see how this turns out.

Software and tools

TravelTime releases isochrone plugin for QGIS blog.traveltimeplatform.com – Share It’s now possible to create isochrone visualisations in QGIS using a new plugin by TravelTime. The plugin supports multiple modes of transport and is free to use for the first 5,000 requests per month.

earthpy released github.com – Share Earth Lab at the University of Colorado have released earthpy, a Python package to support working with spatial data. It can be used for both raster and vector data and can do things like creating hillshades and other types of analysis.

Delaunator v4 github.com – Share Vladimir Agafonkin (creator of Leaflet) has released v4 of Delaunator. It’s a super-fast library for Delaunay triangulation and the latest update improves performance by up to 10%. His other libraries are worth checking out as he’s obsessed with making them as fast as possible — handy for animation and 3D visualisation.

kepler.gl (3D maps) for Jupyter medium.com – Share Uber have integrated their kepler.gl 3D spatial visualisation library into Jupyter Notebook. It’s now possible to plot complex maps directly inside a notebook by using Python as you would normally. I’m excited to see what sorts of things people create using this.

Articles

Finding hidden ship tracks earthobservatory.nasa.gov – Share NASA are using machine learning to detect particles emitted from ships as they work their way across the oceans. They do this using data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on their Aqua satellite. It’s even possible to detect the ships at night!

What to consider when creating choropleth maps blog.datawrapper.de – Share This fantastic article by Datawrapper covers the various things to consider when using choropleth maps. It’s a useful reference for understanding when to use a choropleth and how to make them communicate things better.

Calculating 30 billion speed estimates a week with Apache Spark blog.mapbox.com – Share Mapbox collect over 300 million miles of anonymised location data every day to produce speed estimations for routing. This article by Saba El-Hilo goes into detail about how they use Apache Spark to calculate 30 billion of those speed estimations each week.

OpenStreetMap and curb regulations medium.com – Share SharedStreets have created an open standard for curb restriction data (eg. parking restrictions) and have been working on integrating this standard into OpenStreetMap. The idea is that governments can release curb-restriction data and it can be directly integrated into tools and maps using this standard.

Data

MarineCadastre.gov vessel traffic data (AIS) marinecadastre.gov – Share If you’re at all interested in data related to shipping then you should check out the MarineCadastre.gov vessel traffic data. It includes minute-by-minute snapshots of vessel positions off the coast of the US since 2009.

OpenStreetMap planet data as GeoPackage download.osmdata.xyz – Share Storing spatial data in a GeoPackage is particularly hot at the moment. You can now access OpenStreetMap planet data in GeoPackage format, updated every two months.

Events

Call for Nominations for the 2019 Sol Katz Award www.osgeo.org – Share Do you know someone who has had a big impact in Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G)? The Sol Katz award is given to people who have demonstrated leadership within the FOSS4G community. Nominations close at the end of August 8th.

European Space Agency Earth Observation Phi-Week phiweek.esa.int – Share Are you interested in the future of Earth Observation? The ESA Earth Observation Phi-Week is taking place in mid-September and aims to look at the latest developments as well as what’s coming next.

Geological Remote Sensing Group — Annual Conference call for papers www.grsg.org.uk – Share Are you working on something related to remote sensing? The Geological Remote Sensing Group are currently accepting proposals to present at their annual conference in December. They’re particularly interested in presentations that cover longwave infrared and radar / InSAR.

Jobs

Satellite Image Quality Engineer — Planet www.planet.com – Share Planet are looking for someone to work on end-to-end validation of their satellite imagery data — monitoring trends, detecting issues, evaluating performance, etc. The role is in Berlin and you need to have experience with remote sensing data.

Assistant Professor in Transport Geography — University of Hong Kong jobs.hku.hk – Share The University of Hong Kong are looking for someone at PhD level with expertise in transport geography. The role will be to teach undergraduate and postgraduate students and conduct research in fields related to transport geography.

Early Stage Researcher (Geophysics) — University of Bremen www.uni-bremen.de – Share The University of Bremen are looking for someone at Masters level in a field related to geophysics. You’ll be working on the SLATE project, researching submarine landslides and creating a 3D slope model.

Who to follow

Craig Taylor (@CraigTaylorGIS) twitter.com – Share I’ve been a fan of Craig Taylor for a while now — his work in 3D spatial visualisation is second to none and he is a constant source of inspiration. He works at Ito World and creates all sorts of beautiful visualisations; ranging from infrastructure and air traffic, to tracking his dogs using GPS as they tear around a local field (above).

Who inspires you from the community? I can only highlight the people that I’m aware of, so get in touch if you have someone you admire in the community who deserves some recognition. You can reply to this email or contact me on Twitter

Community space

Peermaps peermaps.org – Share Decentralised maps are becoming more and more important as we move towards centralised platforms for spatial data and maps. Peermaps and Mapeo — suggested by @dietrich and Karissa McKelvey — are two methods for putting the control back in the hands of users. Instead of relying on centralised servers, you’re able to share spatial data and maps using peer-to-peer technology, which means that it’s possible to use even offline. This is particularly powerful for humanitarian projects and those in disaster areas where an Internet connection can’t be guaranteed.

Kickstarter for QGIS terrain shading plugin www.kickstarter.com – Share Zoran Čučković ( QGIS Whisperer ) is raising funds to work on a new QGIS plugin to create realistic shadows from elevation data. It’d be amazing to be able to achieve this sort of effect directly inside of QGIS instead of using software like Blender.

Spatial Awareness on Slack

I’ve set up a Slack chat for the Spatial Awareness community to talk maps and help shape future issues of the newsletter. Please join if you’d like to be part of that community and have a direct channel of communication with me. I’ll also be sharing early access to issues with a select group who are happy to help me proofread and generally double-check things. We’ve already got a large group of people signed up with a wide variety of expertise. You can join here — I’m looking forward to seeing you!

That's a wrap

It’s crazy to think that this is the end of the fourth issue, when just a month ago the newsletter didn’t even exist. I’m so happy to see how it has been received so far and I can’t wait to see what the next issues have in store — I have some exciting stuff planned which I hope to put in place soon. What was that? Did someone say interviews with people from the spatial community?! 😉 So what do you think? What did you like? What didn’t you like? If you liked it then please click on the thumbs up button below as it helps me work out general sentiment. Plus the feedback helps give me energy to keep this going. Don’t forget to reply to this email if you have any feedback, suggestions for content or just want to say hi. You can also reach me on Twitter , where I’m usually posting all sorts of interesting spatial-related stuff. See you in the next one.

Did you enjoy this issue?

If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here

Powered by Revue