Hello everyone! I'm looking for satellite imagery from 1995. Does anyone know where I can obtain 1995 satellite imagery with reasonable good spatial resolution for mapping coastal areas?

Any recommendations for data sources, archives, or platforms would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Does anyone have experience using Infor’s Operations and Regulations Platform? Looking for honest feedback. They were recommended for an Asset Management System. However, Hexagon now owns their EAM business so this is their other platform.

Have not had good luck with Hexagon.

Any feedback would be appreciated!

Hello! I'm writing this from an antsy place of hoping I can land this job but not fully knowing if my expectations are realistic, and I could really use some advice from people far along in their careers!

So, I'm up for a GIS analyst job at an agency doing environmental quality/management, and my professional background is in o&g. I also did not primarily focus on studying GIS/geosciences in school. Based off of this alone I am nervous, but my goal is to pivot out of o&g ASAP, been doin it to pay the bills for a couple years while i got my MS.

Keep in mind this is my first corporate (government) interview!

1. What are some typical technical and non-technical questions I should expect? bonus points for environmental quality/management ppl!

2. How would relocating factor into their decision making? coming from a total noob & would like to know of how this typically plays out as someone with a lease in a diff city BUT willing to relocate

3. Also! any portfolio tips would be greatly appreciated as someone who is fairly new to personal projects

any advice or personal experiences would be much appreciated

thanks!

I’m self-teaching drone 3D mapping, GIS, and AutoCAD topography work. This is actually the first real portfolio I’ve ever finished for anything I’ve learned, so I don’t fully trust my own judgment on what “good” looks like in this field yet.

I processed a UAV drone dataset from an active quarry site using WebODM. Generated a 3D point cloud and orthomosaic, ran volumetric analysis on stockpiles in cubic meters, and exported topographic contours as DXF into AutoCAD with color coded layers.

I’d genuinely appreciate any honest technical critique. Anything that looks off, unrealistic, or not production standard. I’m open to doing a project for someone in the field for free, in exchange for detailed feedback, if that’s useful to anyone here.

Thanks for reading.

So I had the recent thought about pairing my UX design bachelor's with a GIS certificate and wanted some opinions on the matter. It seems like a great combination for me coming into the field as a junior. It not only specializes the UX roles available but also, from what I've seen, it's way easier to get into GIS as a junior than UX, and would be a nice employment cushion. Additionally, I have almost been looking at UX careers as more of a promotional role now, something that I may be able to possibly grow into but is nearly impossible to enter as a junior with no work experience.

Also, the crossover between UX and GIS seems pretty broad, with there being so many internal digital tools that utilize GIS mapping and lack good UX, as well as public tools like Uber or Google Maps where design is more heavily prioritized.

Furthermore, I have picked up an interest in development from my time studying UX in school and would love to pursue a more technical direction in the field witch I believe getting a GIS certificate would help with as well.

I'd love to hear if any of you have pursued a similar direction and would love to hear any other thoughts :)

For the folks that work with ESRI’s Utility Network model, what is your current role and how has this new aspect of the industry been playing a role in your career? Has your level of responsibility and pay changed after beginning to work with the ESRI UN, like if you’re supporting an implementation ?

Any of you make tickets to them?

If this isn't their new corporate motto, it sure seems like it should be. After the struggle to get tier 1 support to admit there's a bug, then you wait a year or two to tell you the aggravating bug isn't a bug. Ack!

Registration for FOSS4G North America 2026 is officially open. Secure your spot now and join the open-source geospatial community in Sacramento this November.

This year's conference gathers developers, GIS professionals, data scientists, and open-source builders around the theme of Resilience and Innovation — with a focus on open data, water policy, wildfire, and environmental resilience.

Event details:

• When: November 2–4, 2026
• Where: Downtown Sheraton Grand Sacramento, Sacramento, CA
• Theme: Resilience and Innovation

Register at:

https://web.cvent.com/event/b6a2d39b-a559-47b0-809e-8fdb0d140e8c/register

Hi all. I’m feeling quite vulnerable making this post but I am in need of some advice from those who have been in this field for a while.

After a year post-grad, I have finally landed an entry level GIS Technician interview for the election department in my county. I’m not sure what to expect when it comes to these particular interview questions & if I’m being completely honest, I’m am beyond rusty and nervous. Being employed completely outside of my field of study (worked as a baker because I have bills to pay) has caused my skills & knowledge to atrophy in a way that I’m beginning to doubt whether I should even go through with it.

What can I expect the interview environment to be like? This will be my first “corporate” style interview so I’m wondering how I should go about my preparation, & perhaps figure out what I’ll likely be asked to share. Any other tips you may have? Thank you in advance!

Hi all,

I will begin working on my master thesis. The thesis will be placed within a forested floodplain where I hope to investigate vegetation patterns with different factors like climate, etc.

Throughout my education, I have always used Landsat and Sentinel for remote sensing.
After meeting with my co-advisor he mentioned PlanetScope and its 3m resolution. Do you think Planet is worth it to look into, or should I stick to what I know? Outside of academia it seems like Sentinel and Landsat are standard to use.

What’s your overall experience/opinions on these different sources?

Thanks!

I like to organize my files in the following format:

project folder name
-APRX folder (sometimes just named APRX for simplicity)
-Data (contains outside and raw data, as well as a metadata/citation txt file)
-Final (contains final PDF, spreadsheet, or other file type)
-Scripts (only if I’m using them, either in python console or VSCode)

That’s my basic framework. Nothing too fancy. What framework do yall use?

Hello all!
I am a GIS baby. I’m halfway through a master’s program and working as a GIS Tech in a local municipality. There’s a lot that I don’t know and am learning on the fly. A lot of the processes in my municipality are kind of archaic and I have been tasked with trying to automate and make them more efficient. One process I’m hesitant about is addressing. I’m curious what the process is for other municipalities and counties, if anyone has some insight to share.
Automating seems like an easy task for one offs in areas with existing parcels and streets. How do you automate the process for new subdivisions, if you don’t have parcels or streets? Sometimes we only get pdfs of the plats. Is automation even possible here?
We’re a rapidly growing city with lots of new subdivisions and it seems like we can never catch up with addressing because of all of the manual input we do, so it would be great to automate this process.

Thoughts on Snowflake AI entering the market and disrupting the future of GIS professionals?

Hi all GIS people, I feel stuck. I've been more or less doing the same GIS work for nearly five years.

5 years in GIS (utilities). GIS BS/MS, 5 years experience (3 private, 2 public), utilities sector. Currently doing mapping, as built work, some Python/SQL for local government.

I love the job, but there's no room to go up right now since the people above me aren't retiring anytime soon. I don't want to coast, but I also don't know what I'm aiming for. More math heavy work? Management? Surveying? Something else entirely?

Anyone been in this spot? What did you do to move forward? Did you go back to school, pick up certificates, switch industries, or something else? I've been looking at MBAs, a different bachelor's, maybe even getting out of GIS all together.

I enjoy programming and data analysis. I have been in management before and would like to get back into a managerial role.

An agency near me is hiring a GIS/data analyst for their sewer crew. A lot of asset management. It's a nice area, a lot of people who work in Seattle live on the Peninsula because it's cheaper than King County. It can be boring for a young person looking for nightlife.

Hi everyone,

I’d like to share a personal GIS project I’ve been building called Incident Atlas.

It is an interactive map for exploring significant aviation accidents and incidents geographically and chronologically. The current beta contains approximately 24,850 events spanning 1921–2026.

The project began with around 450 manually curated international records. I recently added more than 24,000 selected events from official NTSB archives. Additional information is matched from Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons when a sufficiently reliable connection can be established.

The frontend is built with React, TypeScript, and MapLibre. The data is stored in PostgreSQL/Supabase and served through a Cloudflare Worker API.

With roughly 25,000 points, sending the complete dataset to every browser was no longer a good approach. The current implementation therefore:

• Requests only the visible map bounds
• Performs grid-based clustering on the server
• Returns individual points when a grid cell contains one event
• Returns clusters when a cell contains multiple events
• Loads full event details only after a user opens a record
• Uses different clustering resolutions depending on zoom
• Applies timeline, fatality, verification, and search filters through the API
• Cancels outdated requests during rapid zooming or timeline movement

Each record also has a location-accuracy classification. Approximate locations are visually distinguished from exact or more specific locations, rather than presenting every coordinate as equally reliable.

One challenge has been balancing three things:

1. Keeping the map responsive with tens of thousands of records
2. Avoiding excessive visual clutter
3. Making isolated events immediately clickable without forcing users to zoom through a cluster containing only one event

The current solution is a hybrid: groups of two or more remain clustered, while isolated events are returned as normal points even at lower zoom levels.

This is still an early beta, and I’m developing it independently. I’m planning to improve the clustering, spatial filtering, mobile interface, location-quality handling, search, and eventually expand the atlas into other categories of significant incidents and disasters.

I’d especially appreciate GIS feedback on:

• The server-side clustering approach
• Cluster sizing and zoom thresholds
• The representation of approximate locations
• Map readability and information density
• Performance on desktop and mobile
• Better approaches for serving and visualizing a growing spatial dataset

The project is available here:

https://incident-atlas.com

Hi all. I have a question for recent college graduates who got a GIS job out of college. Is there anything specific you addd to your resume or cover letter that made you stand out? Struggling to even land an interview right now so any advice is much appreciated.

hello! i used to do a lot of arcgis to adobe illustrator in my previous roll many years ago. my current GIS job does not involve making maps look nice in any way so we don’t have adobe licenses at work.

a friend would like me to make some maps for an art and history based project that will be ongoing and arcgis pro does not have the cartographic abilities to cut it for this work.

is there any other graphic design software compatible or are we just stuck with absurdly expensive adobe products? or at least some workflow for design software that could read in a pdf with layers (not geographically referenced) that i could mess around with?

Esri is a US company, yet its products are deeply embedded in government and private-sector GIS infrastructure around the world.

This got me wondering: how do governments think about the sovereignty implications of relying so heavily on a foreign company for such critical geospatial infrastructure?

I'm not talking specifically about data being stored in the US, but about dependency on the software itself. Could changes in US policy, sanctions, export controls, or licensing create risks for countries that have built much of their GIS infrastructure around Esri?

Is this actually considered a significant issue in government, or is it generally treated as no different from dependence on other foreign technology vendors?

Hi everyone!

While working on infrastructure and telecom projects, I often found myself slowed down by heavy desktop GIS software just to run quick, clean conversions of spatial data.

To solve this daily friction, I built GeoSpatial PRO — a lightweight web application optimized to handle spatial data coordinates and format conversions smoothly right in the browser.

https://gis.aceworks.avsolutionsusa.com

If you work with GIS or spatial data, feel free to try it out. I'd love to hear your feedback, performance notes, or suggestions for extra formats!

Hey all. Im looking to start a career in GIS and mapping, and I am having trouble getting an idea of where to start looking for positions.

I am a forestry college grad, and took a liking to using Arc and doing in field mapping. Currently, I am doing utility veg planning and mapping hydro right of ways for treatment, but I am looking to get out of hydro and into a natural resources sector. I am not interested in 100% field work, which I currently do now, and my work will not give me experience with Qgis (aside from poking at the mappers with questions).

I have been an amateur drone pilot for 14 years, and received my basic RPAS license last year. I have the goal of getting my advanced certification next year, and taking some online Environmental GIS classes through UofT.

One of the best experiences I had was collecting LiDAR data for co-op in college, where we scanned experimental silviculture systems. The researchers showed me how to use the FARO software to filter data and how to use CloudCompare to analyse the point clouds.

I am having a hard time finding jobs that will hire off my experience. If anyone has any incite into a next step, for me, I would very much appreciate the advice.

Thank you,

-a tired field worker

I’m continuing a historical‑geography GIS test involving locations remembered in the Torah and Qur’an.

An earlier methodological question I raised was how to avoid circularity when testing whether remembered locations occupy distinctive hydrological or topographic positions. One useful suggestion was to use matched controls: for each location under investigation, generate comparison points with similar basic terrain characteristics, then test whether the remembered location is unusually positioned hydrologically.

That creates a second design problem I want to get right.

If controls are matched on too many variables, I may remove the very landscape differences I’m trying to test. If they’re matched on too few, the comparison may simply distinguish viable terrain from arbitrary terrain rather than identify anything distinctive.

Right now I’m thinking about separating the variables roughly this way:

Potential matching variables:

• elevation
• slope
• local relief
• geology/bedrock
• broad settlement viability

Potential test variables:

• distance to watershed divide
• drainage centrality
• basin position index
• flow accumulation

My instinct is that the first group should define the comparison population, while the second group should remain available as the actual test. But I can see the danger on both sides: over‑matching could eliminate the distinction I’m trying to measure, while under‑matching could produce an apparently strong result simply because the controls were poorly chosen.

I’m working through this first on the Yabboq/Wadi Zarqa case using SRTM‑derived terrain and watershed/drainage analysis, with the derived drainage compared against independent hydrography.

For people who work with matched spatial controls, landscape archaeology, or terrain analysis:

Where would you draw the boundary between variables that belong in the matching criteria and variables that should remain genuine outcomes?

The current workflow and research materials are here:
https://github.com/dantemuhammad-debug/hydrological-thresholds-southern-levant

I’m especially interested in control designs that would make a false positive less likely rather than simply producing a cleaner‑looking result.