Raf spotted these elegant mappy bags

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.5.2.

This version requires PostgreSQL 12 - 17, GEOS 3.8 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.12+ is needed. SFCGAL 1.4+ is needed to enable postgis_sfcgal support. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 1.5+ is needed.

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• PDF docs: en ja, fr, zh_Hans

• HTML Online en ja fr zh_Hans

• Cheat Sheets:

  • postgis: en ja fr zh_Hans
  • postgis_raster: en ja fr zh_Hans
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This release is a bug fix release that includes bug fixes since PostGIS 3.5.1.

Wijfi said “I think this counts as a @mappery #mapsinthewild even though it’s a pretend place. Seen at #massmoca

“Known for her rich aesthetic and highly detailed constructions, Robin Frohardt is a theater and film director whose work uses recognizable materials-often trash- to create richly detailed worlds that consider the relationship between capitalism and the resulting environmental catastrophe. The tactile quality of cardboard, the low-fi animation effects, rich sound, and dynamic lighting combine to create a cinematic expression that defies the humbleness of the material. Frohardt began using cardboard with the Cardboard Institute of Technology, a collective of artists creating immersive cardboard environments in San Francisco in the early 2000s. Her first cardboard film, Fitzcardboardaldo, premiered in 2013 at the Telluride Film Festival. Seen here is her second cardboard film, Bag, which premiered in 2018 and is a part of her larger work, The Plastic Bag Store.”

A close up view of what the cardboard map looks like from the city looking out towards the countryside.

Cartodataviz shared this 3d topographic map of a part of the botanic garden in Wellington

We start the new year with a double-header release of:

• MapGuide Maestro 6.0m13
• mapguide-react-layout 0.14.10

mapguide-react-layout changes

(reworked) Stamen and (new) StadiaMaps support

But if you do provide a Stadia Maps API key, you'll get the Stamen layers you've seen before.

Since a Stadia Maps API key is now required, we've also added support for other tilesets provided by Stadia Maps, like:

Alidade Smooth Dark

Alidade Satellite

Outdoors

So if you are loading your mapguide-react-layout viewer from a Flexible Layout document, where do you need to specify this new Stadia Maps API key?

MapGuide Maestro Changes

Stamen Maps (changed) and Stadia Maps (new) support

You'll notice that Stamen and Stadia Maps have 2 variants for every layer.

So depending on the context:

This release of mapguide-react-layout will read the Stadia Maps API key from this new setting in the Flexible Layout when initializing with Stamen and Stadia Maps tile layers.

Using spatialreference.org for EPSG > proj4 lookups

Other changes

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Erik spotted this on his vacation in Seville

Oliver Leroy said “Doing some trains nerd tourism, very hard to imagine how big the industry was before and how fast the change happened #mapsinthewild“

I couldn’t resist some nerdy research and found this

My first day at OPENGIS.ch back in September wasn’t what you usually expect when starting at a new workplace. Instead of diving head first into some complex code repository or reading up on company policies, I found myself scribbling lines and circles onto paper.

The OPENGIS.ch team was meeting in Bern at Puzzle ITC / We Are Cube for a workshop on visualizing ideas, hosted by Mayra and Jürgen from We Are Cube. For a few hours, a room full of slightly unsure, but mostly intrigued geo ninjas armed with pencils and paper discovered a new way to express their ideas through simple visuals.

Getting Started: Persuading the «I-Can’t-Draw-For-My-Life» Crowd

Entering the meeting room, some felt slightly threatened by the pencils on the table, but we were quickly assured that no one was expected to become the next Picasso – just to visualize ideas. Easy, right?

Visualizations help us understand, remember, and process ideas better than text or numbers can. Our brains are wired to process images far quicker than text. Being able to sketch ideas is a great skill, so let’s do it!

But for some of us, artistic expression is limited to drawing UML diagrams, and even that can be outsourced to code (see this nifty little tool called Mermaid). So, when it came time to draw our favorite animals as a warm-up, some people were a bit out of their comfort zone. But we soon learned that there are many neat tricks and strategies to make visualizing ideas easier.

The Basics: Shapes, Containers, Arrows, Expressions

After getting over the stress of drawing animals, it was time to get into the basics. Jürgen explained that everything can be visualized using just a handful of simple shapes: circles, squares, triangles, and lines.

By adding a few details to these shapes, we can visualize many different objects without getting lost in the complexity of reality. And suddenly, a circle can be a hole in the paper, a plate or planet earth.

To then visualize even more complex ideas, only three basic elements are needed – containers (like rectangles or circles), arrows, and facial expressions. Containers represent the things we care about (whether that’s a person, an object, or an idea). Arrows help us show the relationships or flow between them. And facial expressions, well, they capture emotion.

By using these basic elements we build complex ideas – no high-level artistic skill required!

The Story Arc: Put your idea into a story

Now that we were a bit more comfortable with expressing ourselves on paper, we were introduced to the Story Arc. It’s a framework that helps structure a narrative visually. Whether you’re presenting a project, brainstorming a new product, or explaining a complex process, having a clear story structure makes everything easier to understand and remember.

So the last task of the day was to invent a story and visualize it. With nothing more than some simple circles, squiggly lines and lots of imagination, we were able to convey our stories with ease. The results were some catchy tales about empty phone batteries, juggling demanding job tasks or flying to the moon to solve a customer problem.

Conclusion: The power of visualizing Ideas

Turns out, visualizing ideas isn’t just for artists! Whether it’s brainstorming a new product or explaining a complex concept, simple visual tools can make ideas clearer and more memorable.

So, the next time you’re staring at a blank whiteboard or trying to figure out the best way to pitch an idea, just remember: grab a pencil, draw a circle, and let your imagination go wild. 

Thanks, Mayra and Jürgen from We Are Cube – you’ve taught us that even non-artists can visualize ideas, and it’s all just a handful of simple shapes away!

In December, there were 37 new plugins published in the QGIS plugin repository.

Here follows the quick overview in reverse chronological order. If any of the names or short descriptions catches your attention, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below:

Raf spotted this shop sign in Pamplona

I was very lucky to be able to attend FOSS4G 2024, in Belém, Brazil on 2nd - 8th December 2024. Belém is a fantastic city, and due to host COP30 in November 2025, with lots of construction on going. FOSS4G has a wonderful community and a great variety of talks - have a look at the agenda to see the different topics under discussion.

The first two days were workshops, and I attended XYZ Cloud MAPPing 101 presented by Dennis Bauszus, and Community Drone Mapping by Ivan Buendía Gayton. In some ways I find the workshops the most useful element of the conference because it gives you time to dig in to a specific piece of software and learn some new skills, something I am quite poor at doing during my usual ‘day job’! I learnt some new useful skills in both workshops. Dennis has also shared the XYZ Mapping workshop materials if you have more discipline than me(!) and can work through it on your own:

• More details on the app itself
• Start with Getting started
• Then look at the workshop

The Drone workshop was also fascinating, and Ivan did a great job of both teaching us how to fly a drone (easier than I thought) and how to help local communities leverage the power of drones (& wider GIS skills) for their own benefit.

The main conference itself was in the Hanger Convention Centre and it was a great international conference. The laid back approach of FOSS4G always creates a lovely atmosphere and it was a great opportunity to get to know new people in the FOSS4G world, and catch up with people I have met at previous events. Community is one of the key things that I love about this group, with people very willing to help each other out. Uber is a key method of transportation in Brazil, and with a number of the evening social events in the city centre, we usually clubbed together at the hotel reception for an Uber to get us there, and back afterwards!

The variety of talks was incredible, with fascinating applications of FOSS4G tools, discussions on the interaction of academia and FOSS4G and personal reflections on people’s FOSS4G journeys. I particularly Kim Durante’s talk on FAIR Principles for Geospatial Data Curation which might have some very useful ideas for a project I am working on at the moment, and Veronica Andreo’s talk, From field biology to the GRASS GIS board - an open source journey about how she got involved in the GRASS GIS project.

I met one lady from Brazil and this was her first international, English speaking conference. She was really enjoying herself and it was a great introduction to the FOSS4G community for her.

One thing that came across to me was the variety of open source projects, and how some projects seem to be doing very similar things. Two examples that come to mind are QField and Mergin Maps, both of which allow users to collect data in a QGIS project in the field on their phone, and process that data back in the office. Another pair would be QGIS and GRASS GIS, both arguably great quality Desktop GIS tools, and there are many other examples too.

Initially I wondered why there were so many similar tools like this, when it might make more sense to combine effort and focus on one tool, rather than splitting our effort over two? However after a bit of reflection I discovered a) that often two similar tools have differences that make them more useful to different audiences. For example, QField is a more flexible field data collection tool, and Mergin Maps is easier to get up and running with. Also, b) having multiple tools reflects the market approach of encouraging development and innovation, with the best tool ‘winning’. In this context winning is not by having the highest revenues or the highest profits, but by having communities of users and developers. If a project doesn’t have a good group of users and/or a good group of developers interested in keeping the project up to date, then gradually it will fall out of use. I was not expecting to see an example of a capitalist based market in the open source community, but here it is!

I also had the opportunity to met Katja Haferkorn, who is the coordinator for FOSSGIS e.V. FOSSGIS e.V. is the OSGeo Local Chapter for German-speaking countries - D-A-CH, i.e. Germany, Austria and the german speaking part of Switzerland. FOSSGIS e.V. is also the German local chapter for OpenStreetMap. FOSSGIS e.V. is quite unique in that they are a local chapter who has a paid coordinator - Katja - and it was fascinating to hear her experiences. As OSGeo:UK Chair, one of the questions I asked her was about diversity within Local Chapters, and OSGeo as a whole. This is an issue for them as well and it is a aspect of membership that has been challenging the whole community for a while. Katja has written a great blog post about the conference. It is in German, but Google Translate does a reasonable job of translating it into English.

The last two days of the conference was the Code Sprint. This is a chance to meet people working on different open source GIS projects and learn how to contribute to different elements of the projects. I had a great chat with Silvina Meritano and Andrés Duhour about using R as a GIS. Silvina was keen to develop her mapping skills in R, and Andrés had already developed an R package (which he presented at the conference: osmlanduseR) and spent a bit of time learning about and contributing to the new tmap library examples. Tmap version 4 is coming out (blog post coming soon!) and I needed to updated my material for this new version. I also spent some time looking at the Las Calles De Las Mujeres project, which looks at the proportion of streets named after women (rather than men) in a range of Spanish speaking countries. Silvina and I had a go at creating a version in R that could automate some more of the process to apply this to different cities in English speaking countries.

The internet connection at the code sprint was a little variable, so we had some challenges and had to resort to using the “sneaker net” occasionally - using a USB stick to transfer data between us! Fortunately we never had to resort to playing truco - a card game played in Argentina when the internet doesn’t work and you have nothing else to do!

Thanks very much to everyone involved in organising the conference. Many more photos are on Flickr. The conference was a fantastic experience, and if you ever have the opportunity to go to a FOSS4G conference, anywhere, do take it!

If you want help or advice on any open source geospatial tool, or are interested in Introductory or Advanced GIS training in QGIS or R, please do contact me.

Happy new year and welcome to 2025 from the GeoServer team!

Last year we started something different for our project - sharing our 2024 roadmap plans with our community and asking for resources (participation and funding) to accomplish some challenging goals. We would like to provide an update for 2025 and a few words on our experience in 2024.

The GeoServer project is supported and maintained thanks to the hard work of volunteers and the backing of public institutions and companies providing professional support.

GeoServer was started in 2001 by a non-profit technology incubator. Subsequent years has seen the project supported by larger companies with investors and venture capital. This support is no longer available - and without this cushion we must rely on our community to play a greater role in the success of the project.

We are seeking a healthy balance in 2025 and are asking for support in the following areas:

• Maintenance: The GeoServer team uses extensive automation, quality assurance tools, and policy of dropping modules to “right size” the project to match developer resources.

  However maintenance costs for software markedly increased in 2024 as did time devoted to security vulnerabilities. This causes the components used by GeoServer to be updated more frequently, and with greater urgency.

  ✳️ Community members can answer questions on geoserver-user forum, reproduce issues as they are reported, and verify fixes.

  ✳️ Developers are encouraged to get started by reviewing pull-requests to learn what is needed, and then move on to fixing issues.

• Security Vulnerabilities: GeoServer works with an established a coordinated vulnerability disclosure policy, with clear guidelines for individuals to particpate based on trust, similar to how committers are managed. Our 2024 experience with CVE-2024-36401 highlights the importance of this activity for our community and service providers.

  ✳️ Trusted volunteers can help mind geoserver-security email list, and help reproduce vulnerabilities as they are reported. We also seek developer capacity and funding to address confirmed vulnerabilities.

• Releases: Regular release and community testing is a key success factor for open source projects and is an important priority for GeoServer. Peter has done a great job updating the release instructions, and many of the tasks are automated, making this activity far easier for new volunteers.

  ✳️ Developers and Service Providers are asked to make time available to to assist with the release process.

  Asking our community to test release candidates ahead of each major release has been discontinued due to lack of response. The GeoServer team operates with a time-boxed release model so it is predictable when testing will be expected.

  ✳️ Community members and Service Providers are asked to help test nightly builds ahead of major releases in March and April.

• Testing: Testing of new functionality and technology updates is an important quality assurance activity We have had some success asking downstream projects directly to test when facing technical-challenges in 2023.

  ✳️ We anticipate extensive testing will be required for GeoServer 3 and ask everyone to plan some time to test out nightly builds with your own data and infrastructure during the course of this activity.

• Sponsorship: In 2023 we made a deliberate effort to “get over being shy” and ask for financial support, setting up a sponsorship page, and listing sponsors on our home page.

  The response has not been in keeping with the operational costs of our project and we seek ideas on input on an appropriate approach.

  ✳️ We ask for your financial assistance in 2025 (see bottom of page for recommendations).

The above priorities of maintenance, testing and sponsorship represent the normal operations of an open-source project. This post is provided as a reminder, and a call to action for our community.

2025 Roadmap Planning

CITE Certification

Our CITE Certification was lost some years ago, due to vandalism of a build server, and we would like to see certification restored.

OGC CITE Certification is important for two reasons:

• Provides a source of black-box testing ensuring that each GeoServer release behaves as intended.
• Provides a logo and visibility for the project helping to promote the use of open standards.

Recent progress on this activity:

• As part of a Camptocamp organized OGCAPI - Features sprint Gabriel was able setup a GitHub workflow restoring the use of CITE testing for black-box testing of GeoServer. Gabriel focused on OGC API - Features certification but found WMS 1.1 and WCS 1.1 tests would also pass out of the box, providing a setup for running the tests in each new pull request.
• Andrea made further progress certifying the output produced by GeoServer, restoring the WMS 1.3, WFS 1.0 and WFS 1.1 tests, as well as upgrading the test engine to the latest production release. In addition, CITE tests that weren’t run in the past have been added, like WFS 2.0 and GeoTIFF, while other new tests are in progress, like WCS 2.0, WMTS 1.0 and GeoPackage.
• The Open Source Geospatial Foundation provides hosting for OSGeo Projects. Peter is looking into this opportunity which would allow the project to be certified and once again be a reference implementation.

✳️ Please reach out on the developer forum and ask how you can help support this activity.

GeoServer 3

GeoServer 3 is being developed to address crucial challenges and ensure that GeoServer remains a reliable and secure platform for the future.

Staying up-to-date with the latest technology is no longer optional — it’s essential. Starting with spring-framework-6, each update requiring several others to occur at the same time.

Our community is responding to this challenge but needs your support to be successful:

• Brad and David have made considerable progress on Wicket UI updates over the course of 2024, and with Steve’s effort on Content Security Policy compliance (CSP headers are enabled by default in newer versions of Wicket).

• Andreas Watermeyer (ITS Digital Solutions) has been steadily working on Spring Security 5.8 update and corresponding OAuth2 Secuirty Module replacements.

• Consortium of Camptocamp, GeoSolutions and GeoCat have responded to our roadmap challenge with a bold GeoServer 3 Crowdfunding. The crowd funding is presently in phase one collecting pledges, when goal is reached phase two will collect funds and start development.

  Check out the crowdfunding page for details, faq, including overview of project plan.

  

✳️ Pledge support for GeoServer 3 Crowdfunding using email or form.

✳️ Developers please reach out on the developer forum if you have capacity to work on this activity.

✳️ Testers GeoServer 3 will need testing with your data and environment over the course of development.

Service Providers

Service providers bring GeoServer technology to a wider audience. We recognize core-contributors who take on an ongoing responsibility for the GeoServer project on our home page, along with a listing of commercial support on our website. We encourage service providers offering GeoServer support to be added to this list.

Helping meet project roadmap planning goals and objectives is a good way for service providers to gain experience with the project and represent their customers in our community. We recognize service providers that contribute to the sustainability of GeoServer as experienced providers.

✳️ We encourage service providers to directly take project maintenance and testing activities, and financially support the project if they do not have capacity to participate directly.

Sponsorship Opportunities

The GeoServer Project Steering Committee uses your financial support to fund maintenance activities, code sprints, and research and development that is beyond the reach of an individual contributor.

GeoServer recognizes your financial support on our home page, sponsorship page and in release notes and presentations. GeoServer is part of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and your financial support of the project is reflected on the OSGeo sponsorship page.

Recommendations:

• Individuals can use Donate via GitHub Sponsors to have their repository badged as supporting OSGeo.
• Individuals who offer GeoServer services should consider $50 USD a month to be listed as a bronze Sponsor on the OSGeo website.
• Organisations using GeoServer are encouraged to sponsor $50 USD a month to be listed as a bronze sponsor on the OSGeo website.
• Organisations that offer GeoServer services should consider $250 a month to be listed as a silver sponsor on the OSGeo website.

✳️ For instructions on sponsorship see how to Sponsor via Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Further reading:

• GeoServer-2025-Sponsorship-Opportunities
• State of GeoServer 2.26.1

Raf shared this pic. ’Candles shelf decorated with globes at Les Topettes perfume shop in Barcelona Raval’

In this new release, you will find new algorithms, default output styles, and other usability improvements, in particular for working with public transport schedules in GTFS format, including:

• Added GTFS algorithms for extracting stops, fixes #43
• Added default output styles for GTFS stops and segments c600060
• Added Trajectory splitting at field value changes 286fdbd
• Added option to add selected fields to output trajectories layer, fixes #53
• Improved UI of the split by observation gap algorithm, fixes #36

Note: To use this new version of Trajectools, please upgrade your installation of MovingPandas to >= 0.21.2, e.g. using

import pip; pip.main(['install', '--upgrade', 'movingpandas'])

or

conda install movingpandas==0.21.2

No, we aren’t adding mugs to the Mappery shop but Erik spotted this in ashop window. “I just noticed that I didn’t share this lovely hidden @mappery mug yet… Found in Vienna, in the Hundertwasser village shop #Mapsinthewild on my way back from the #QGISUC2024“

The question is did Erik buy it?

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Barry’s got his fancy, famous knit hat already. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for mine to emerge from the knitting needles.

For anyone interested, the knitting patterncan be found here

Raf shared this map of Porrera in Priorat, Catalunya, on the back label of Cassanella white wine

I did a lot of reading last year, a lot, perhaps because I had a lot of down time. I tend to read before going to sleep, and recovery from surgery and other things means I go to bed early and then fill the time between bed and sleep with books. Books, books, and more books.

To be totally precise, I read books on a Kindle, which allows me to read in the middle of the night in the dark with the back light. Also to read from any position, since all books are the same, light weight when consumed via an e-reader. I am a full e-reader convert.

Anyway, I’ve had means, motive and opportunity, and I read a tonne. Some of it was bad, some of it was good, some of it was memorable, some not. Of the 50 or so books I read last year, here are ten that made me go “yes, that was good and memorable”.

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver

I used to read Booker Prize winners, but I found the match to my taste was hit-and-miss. The Pullitzer Prize nominees list, on the other hand, has given me piles of great reads. I am still mining it for recommendations, older and older entries.

Anyways, this modern day re-telling of Dicken’s David Copperfield is set in Apallacia, amid the height of the opiod crises. The book is tightly written, has some lovely turns of phrase, and a nice tight narrative push, thanks to the borrowed plot structure. I re-read the Dickens after, because it was so much fun to mark out the character borrowings and plot beats.

Master Slave, Husband Wife, Ilyon Woo

This non-fiction re-telling of an original slavery escape narrative is occasionally verbose, but an excellent entrant into a whole category of writing I did not know existed, the contemporaneous slavery escape narrative. For obvious reasons, abolitionists before the Civil War were keen to promote stories that humanized the people trapped in the south, who might otherwise be theoretical to Northern audiences.

The book re-tells the escape of Ellen and William Craft, and wraps that story in a lot of historical context about the millieu they were escaping from (Georgian slavery) and to (abolitionist circles in the North). The actual text of their story is liberally quoted from, but this is a re-telling. Frederick Douglass appears in their story, which gave me the excuse I have been waiting for a long time to read the next book in this list.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

It took me way too long to finally pick up this book, given that Douglass has showed up as such an important figure in the other historical books I have read: Team of Rivals, Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, And There Was Light.

One goes into books from the 1800s wondering just how punishing the language is going to be. Clauses upon subclauses upon subclauses? None of that here. Douglass writes wonderfully clean prose the modern mind can handle, and tells his story with economy but still enough context to make it powerful. Probably because as a master story teller, he was pitching for an audience much like the modern one – made up of people with little knowledge of the particulars of the slave system, just a broad and overly simple sense of the injustice. After 150 years, still devestating and accessible.

How Much of These Hills Is Gold, C Pam Zhang

The Goodreads crew does not seem to think this book is as good as I do, but what strikes me about it and what makes me slot it into my “years best” is that I remember it so clearly. This is a historical novel of the California gold rush, from the eyes of children born to Chinese immigrants in the gold fields. It’s both an intense family drama, and an meditation on the power of place. It left me with a strongly remembered sense of the land, and the characters. Even though it covers a big swathe of years, the cast of characters remains small and their interactions meaningful. It’s memorable!

(Also, and this is no small thing, I read Into the Distance by Hernan Diaz this year too, which is set in the same time period and has some of the same beats… so maybe these books are a pairing.)

Julia, Sandra Newman

It’s a great time to be reading about authoritarianism! In the same spirit as pairing up Demon Copperhead with David Copperfield, I also paired up a reading of George Orwell’s 1984 with this retelling of the same story from the point of view of Julia, the love interest in Orwell’s book.

Newman takes the opportunity to flesh out Julia as a character and also the world of 1984 a little more, which makes the re-read of the original really fun. I do not think I noticed before just how much Winston Smith is a self-absorbed schmuck, but once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee it.

The Bee Sting, Paul Murray

A tragedy told from the inter-leaved view points of four members of a family falling apart. Each chapter from a different character, each builds up the point of view narrator and also illuminates the others. Mostly the reveal is who these people are, bit by bit, but the plot also slowly clicks together like a puzzle until that last piece slides in, and oh boy.

An easy engaging read that gets more and more intense, but you cannot look away.

Yellowface, R F Huang

Written by an Asian-American author, about a white author appropriating the story of an Asian-American author, the story is gripping, snarky, and unblinking in its takedown of the publishing industry. Come for the plot, stay for the commentary on modern meme-making and self-promotion, the intersection between who we are and who we present ourselves as. On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog. Or everybody knows you are a dog and hates you for it.

The Librarianist, Patrick deWitt

I don’t think this book made many or any “best of” lists, so it is not clear to me what caused me to read it, but it was a treat. Just a very quiet story about an introverted retired librarian, finding his way as he transitions into retirement, and builds some new connections with his community. Sounds really boring, I know, but I hoovered it up and it still sticks with me. A good read if you need some optimism and calm in your life.

Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe

A history of the Troubles in Ireland, wrapped around the story of a particular murder, long unsolved, that slowly reveals itself over the decades, as the perpetrators come to terms with their part in that violent chapter of history. The Goodreaders really like this one and I agree. I knew the bare minimum of this chapter of world history (what I gleaned from CNN at the time, and from Derry Girls more recently) and this telling makes an easy introduction, covering a wide sweep of time and context.

Notes from the Burning Age, Claire North

Claire North remains a lesser-known science fiction author, despite her low-key hit The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (read it!), but I’m a convert, and this novel reminded me why. The world is a post-climate crisis culture that has achieved some spiritual and technological balance with the ecology, but is wrestling with the return of what we would describe as “business as usual” – the subjugation of the natural world to the needs of humans.

Following an ecological monk, turned spy, from inside the capital of the new humanists, through the other realms of this world is easy because the journey is wrapped in a high-stakes espionage story. Of all the climate stories I have read lately, this one taken from such a long distance in the future speaks to me most. I want to think we will build something new and better, and while I know our human nature can be malign, I also know it can be beautiful.

Trust, Hernan Diaz

Best for last. Told in multiple sections from multiple perspectives in multiple styles, every narrator is unreliable, each in their own way, but the idea that there is a kernel of truth lying beneath it all never goes away (and yet, is never truly revealed). Perhaps a perfect book club novel for that reason. (Not where I got it, it’s another Pullitzer winner.)

Some facts everyone agrees on. There is a very rich and powerful financier. He has a relationship with a woman who he marries who is very important to him. But in what way? Unclear. And man is malign, but in what ways? The usual mercenary ones you might expect of a Wall Street lion? Worse and additional ways? Unclear. The whole thing is a puzzle box, the language, the characters, the events. Read it. Read it again. Read it a third time.

Cartodataviz shared this stunner. “#Mapinthewild Map of Wellington city on a container’

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Jeff Monroe shared these mappy flags outside the Urban Lab in Turin

Hi, my name is Sean Gillies, and this is my blog. Blog is short for "web log". I write about running, cooking and eating, gardening, travel, family, programming, Python, API design, geography, geographic data formats and protocols, open source, and internet standards. Mostly running and local geography. I live in Fort Collins, Colorado, and sometimes in Montpellier, France. I work at TileDB, which sells a multimodal data platform for precision medicine. I appreciate emailed comments on my posts. You can find my address in the "about" page linked at the top of this page. Happy New Year!

The Aurora Borealis over Northern Wyoming, viewed from Colorado on May 24, 2024.

Gardening looks like a fun and satisfying activity, does it not? And a source of fresh and tasty ingredients? It really is, and it’s something you can enjoy for the rest of your life. You have probably seen older relatives or neighbors puttering contentedly in their gardens. That could be you someday!

If you don’t have a garden, and want to try one, how do you get started? I’m going to try to answer that question and point you to better and more complete gardening resources.

I know very little about commercial farming, but I do know about growing fruits and vegetables for fun. I grew up in a gardening family. My parents were students and hippies and our household budget was super tight for a few years. A big backyard garden was part of our subsistence plan. After a teenage hiatus, during which I lived on M&Ms, Doritos, and Mountain Dew, I returned to gardening and have been at it ever since. I even had a little container garden when we were living in Montpellier, France.

A tiny kitchen garden (un potager, in French) in November.

Currently, my garden is pretty small, 18 square meters (190 square feet) in 6 raised beds and a strip of soil adjacent to one of the beds. It provides all the basil, beans, cucumbers, lettuce, scallions, and zucchini that my family can eat from June to September, plus half of our annual garlic consumption, and some novelty melons and peppers.

During the growing season I spend about 30 minutes each day watering, weeding, and whatever [1]. Much of that time is pure enjoyment. I could garden more efficiently if I wanted to. Preparing the garden for planting in the spring takes a couple weekend afternoons of hauling compost and digging, but not more than that.

Let’s presume that you’re interested in gardening in soil, on the ground. It’s a practical starting point and I’m not qualified to give advice about hydroponic or container gardening. With that, your basic requirements are soil, sun, water, and seeds.

If you can, start with accessible, flat, non-compacted ground, that is mostly free of rocks and weeds, and is close to a water source. Pull and dig out the existing vegetation and mix commercial compost into the top 6 inches. A 1.5 cubic foot bag per 10 square feet is a good start. Ground that has seen a lot of foot traffic or has had cars parked on it will need a lot of treatment before plants will thrive in it. Water tends to run off sloped ground, and scattered seeds will, too. From a gardening perspective, turf grass is a weed, and a chore to remove. I installed raised soil beds in my backyard instead of removing our turf, but that’s pretty expensive and I don’t recommend starting this way. A small garden won’t need any herbicides. Just pull the weeds by hand or dig them out with a trowel.

Plant growth is powered by photosynthesis, and fruiting plants, such as cucumbers, beans, and tomatoes, enjoy full sun. Leafy greens like lettuce and spinach will tolerate partial shade. Sun might be the limiting factor in an urban or suburban environment with buildings and trees. You can’t add more sunshine, but climbing plants can get more out of limited light on the ground. In some cases you may want to filter photons. My neighbor has found that our Colorado Front Range sunshine is too strong for her favorite tropical peppers, and hangs sheets of fabric to give them a marginal amount of shade. This is an advanced gardening scenario, however.

Photosynthesis converts carbon dioxide and water into the sugar that fuels a plant’s growth. Water will be one of your most important considerations. Your garden’s water needs will be determined by soil drainage, but mostly by the growth rate of your vegetables. If plants are wilting, they are not growing. That’s the signal that I look for in my garden. It’s fine for the soil to be dry on top as long as the plants look perky. It’s hard to over-irrigate in sunny and dry climates, so I’m not very skilled at recognizing the signs of a waterlogged garden. I water by hand with a hose and a sprinkler wand attachment. This is a perfectly adequate way to start.

Choosing what to grow and when to put it in the ground is a fun puzzle. In any climate there is a good variety of plants to try. Since most will require 60-90 days of growth before harvest, there is some commitment involved. Assuming that you’re not trying to grow all your food, I suggest beginning with a limited variety at a time. It will be more rewarding to pick a bowl of green beans than to pick a handful of beans and one tomato. In a mild climate, you can easily grow one spring/summer crop and one summer/fall crop. For example, snap peas or spinach early in the year, and chard or winter squash later. And, there’s always next year to try something new.

My only recommendations on what to begin with are cherry tomatoes, basil, pole beans, cucumbers, lettuce, scallions, and summer squash. Cucumbers, beans, and squash will rapidly outgrow most weeds, thanks to their large seeds. Pole beans let you exploit conditions where light is scarce on the ground. Many Asian cucumber varieties thrive when trained vertically on a trellis. Cherry tomatoes do well in large pots or other containers and can climb if you provide structure like a wire cage. These are all great when you have limited space.

Scallions, or bunching onions, are perennial, cold-resistant, and tolerate some shade. Plant them on an edge of your garden, as they will spread when they have established, and you may never again have to buy slimy supermarket green onions. Lettuce is also good for cool weather and partial shade, and you’ll be able to pick leaves in less than 6 weeks. Sow lettuce seeds generously and thin them as they grow larger.

Fresh-picked basil speaks for itself. I like to grow both the Genovese and Thai varieties.

A raised garden bed packed with basil plants.

With the exception of the beans, lettuce, and scallions, which should be planted directly into soil, I start these seeds indoors in peat pots filled with general purpose potting mix, 6 weeks before their outdoor planting date, 3-4 per pot. Once it’s clear which is the most vigorous, behead the others with a pair of scissors, and let the favored plant take over the peat pot. After your last frost, stick the plant and its peat pot into the ground. Roots will have no trouble penetrating the pot as it breaks down.

Buying young vegetable plants in small black plastic pots from a garden store is an option to consider. They will probably be larger than plants that you would start at home in your first try. They’ll be more expensive than starting from seed, of course, and you won’t find as much variety as you will in a seed catalog. Still, you’re very likely to find good cherry tomato plants. Get some red Sweet 100 and sweet yellow plum tomatoes and plant them in 5 gallon pots.

Locate some flat, sunny ground, and add compost. Choose and start some seeds in peat pots or source some vegetable starts. Plant them after your last frost, water them regularly, and watch them for flowers and fruit. These are the basics of starting a garden. There are lots of little details, of course, but you don’t need to know all of them before you begin. A printed gardening bible, like Southern Living or Western Gardens, will fill in many of the details. I refer to Western Gardens often. Your local State University’s Ag Extension program will have tons of information about gardening in your particular climate. Colorado State’s is very good. I checked this blog post against CSU's Plant Talk as I wrote it to be sure that I was not contradicting the experts.

Lastly, here’s a brief shopping list for 2 5 x 5 foot garden beds, a nice small beginning garden.

• Short, D-handle shovel: $24.99

• Hand trowel: $8.99

• Watering wand: $19.99

• 5 bags compost at $8.99 each

• 10 pack of 3” peat pots: $4.99

• 4 quart bag of potting mix: $9.99

• Seeds of your choice: $2.99 per packet

That’s less than $130. If you harvest 30 organic cucumbers, which 4 plants can easily produce, you’ll break even. Of course, this does not include water, which might be $40 per month, or more, and your time. Don’t expect to break even. Instead, look forward to developing a different appreciation for the weather and the seasons, and to the pleasure of enjoying your own homegrown cucumber or tomato.

A child holding two long white radishes, pretending that they are tusks.

[1] This expression is from Farm Days, by William Wegman.

We took this at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. No matter how many times I see pictures of the earth taken from space I am still thrilled by the concept of men in space.

We’ve tried to give you a double dose of Maps in the Wild over the 12 days of Christmas and this is the last, thanks for all of your contributions or just for following us – here’s hoping that 2025 is a great year for all of us.

Erik stopped for coffee and chose the Strong George roast from Brazil. “Coffee at work. With a nice @mappery #mapsinthewild. Yes, the Strong Geo-rge for me of course.”

Wanmei shared this Mappy sightings from the Aquarium of the Pacific, California.

Shared by M. Le Cartographe. Santé! (Cheers)

Le Cartograph sent us this beautiful map from Parque, a tube station in Lisbon.

El mayor evento internacional FOSS4G celebrado en Brasil este año 2024 ha reunido a cientos de personas de todo el mundo, interesadas en compartir su trabajo o interés en los datos y herramientas libres. Gracias a la colaboración y organización de los equipos locales y los apoyos nacionales e internacionales, el desarrollo de esta gran celebración OSGeo en Belem, ha sido realmente extraordinaria. Una gran acogida llena de amabilidad, nos ha hecho sentir como en casa y el gran número de ponencias, charlas y talleres ha conseguido que aprendamos sobre las nuevas tendencias y trabajos que se vienen desarrollando con las nuevas tecnologías y aplicaciones del mundo geo. Personalmente ha sido una oportunidad para el reencuentro con un enorme número de grandes profesionales tanto en las jornadas como en las conferencias de QGISLatam2024 y SOTMLatam2024 celebradas entorno a ellas. Y por supuesto es imposible no mencionar la inestimable implicación, trabajo y participación de Geochicas en esta edición donde han estado presentes tanto en la organización previa como en su desarrollo remarcando una vez más la importancia de aumentar la diversidad para tener un conocimiento más acorde y amplio de las necesidades reales en las aplicaciones open source.

Ken spotted this, he said “Both the line and use of ‘Greenwich’ seems a bit of an appropriation for a Turkish coffee house but it’s a wild #mapsinthewild”

Without arguing the cartographic appropriation bit, I think there may be a few of us who need a good strong coffee this morning.

Mappy New Year everyone!

I had pre Christmas lunch with some friends who used to call themselves the Teddington Geo-Mafia but they had to drop the Teddington bit wjen they invited me to join them. We lunched at a restaurant called Zedel near Picadilly and they had these lovely postcards, I thought I would nab one for a Map in the Wild.

Atanas Entchev shared the opening page from the 2025 GeoHipster calendar – Disconnected World, Internet shutdowns and throttles around the world 2019 to 2024

Happy new year to all of our Maps in the Wild community.

Mappy New Year, let’s show a bit of love to each other and to our planet.

When I visited my pal Mark in New York, he plied me with his collection of whiskies including this Jefferson’s Ocean which is apparently aged while being sailed around the world. Very smooth and warming.

2024's gardening season was warm, dry, and long. Long enough to grow potatoes, followed by green beans, in one raised bed, and garlic followed by basil and peppers in another. Long enough to grow ripe Chanterais and watermelon, even with a slightly late start. We had the usual good amount of cucumber and zucchini.

This was my best melon harvest yet. More than a dozen small Chanterais (a smooth-skinned canteloupe) and five large personal-sized watermelons. One of them weighed 4 kilograms!

Two halves of a large watermelon the size of a small watermelon on a bamboo cutting board.

We had 3-4 cucumbers a day in July and August and were still picking one every other day in mid-October.

A cucumber shaped like a question mark, wondering, on October 10, when summer will end.

August, September, and October were all about beans, beans, beans. So many bean pods.

A large steel bowl full of green bean pods on October 24.

Our long season allowed all my sweet peppers to fully ripen. We grew yellow Corno di Toro and red Carmen peppers and cooked them into piperade and similar dishes.

A large steel bowl stacked full of long, thin, yellow and red peppers.

I planted Shishito peppers this summer and neglected them for more than a month. Summer went so long that there was time for them to revive, flower, and produce a pretty good crop of fruit before the first frost. I'll grow these again next year and take better care of them.

Charred and salted green shishito peppers on a white plate.

For our raised beds, the only change I'm planning to make next year is to not grow potatoes and plant some other vegetables instead in the early half of the season. More spinach and mustard greens, perhaps. I got a Kitazawa Seed Company catalog in the mail on Saturday and am looking forward to browsing it for ideas.

The other major producer in my backyard was our Damson plum tree. I made over a dozen pints of jam, which I've been eating regularly, and a liter of Damson liqueur, which I've been holding for the new year.

We compost all of our household vegetable waste. Coffee grounds, egg shells, potato peels, banana skins, etc., and also fallen leaves and soiled straw from the chicken coop. Every year we transfer the mature composted matter into our raised beds. Despite this, we seem to be running a small nutrient deficit. Plants languished in my one bed where I have not planted a late summer crop of beans, and I resorted to using a fertilizer solution to wake up the Shishito peppers. I'm considering the removal of some tired soil and replacing it with commercial compost.

2024 was an uncomplicated year for backyard gardening here. Access to tap water, of course, means we're always gardening in easy mode. We had no hail, no late or early freezes, and plenty of sun. 2025 could be different. We will have to wait and see.

2024 was a bust, but I like my plan and am going to reuse it for 2025. That means my A race is the Bear 100 Mile in September and my B race is the Never Summer 100K in July. I'm already registered for those two events. I'm still looking for shorter events for April, May, and June.

My long range planning spreadsheet looks like this today. 32 weeks of training in four phases. It's modeled after the one on page 230 of Jason Koop's book (2nd edition) and begins with eight weeks emphasizing speed work and weight lifting, with plenty of active recovery and bike riding.

Screenshot of a Google spreadsheet. Each week from January through September is a column.

My oldest kid is signed up for the Bolder Boulder 10K in May, and I'll be supporting her there. Maybe I should sign up for it. I have never run a paved 10K.

My friend David Bitner, who got me into ultrarunning, is coming to Colorado for Never Summer and I am super excited about that. It'll be a good time.

Once upon a time, there was a man called Giovanni (totally fictional name, by any means related to NaturalGIS’s CEO and Open Source advocate, Giovanni Manghi). He was a daily QGIS power user and he loved the software, but he had an itch… Something was troubling him. As any other main character of the traditional tales, instead of looking away, he decided to accept the quest and solve it.

This itch of his was about the QGIS layout grids. It used to take Giovanni about 10 minutes to create a nice grid for a map layout, and then, another 20 minutes to replicate it a few times for different scales with small variations. If he had to do this operation one or two times every week, at the end of the year, he would have lost up to 34 hours of his precious and very limited time.