by Peter Smythe (noreply@blogger.com) at June 10, 2026 04:46 PM
Here’s another QField release, packed with the features that have been at the top of professional surveyors’ wish list! (hint: it’s in the title) — plus improvements across the board for our wide range of users.
First up, NTRIP support has been added in QField unlocking sub-centimeter accuracy position readings without the need for any third-party app. This has long been requested by cadastral surveyors and other professional field workers in need of highly accurate data where being a few centimeters off can have real consequences.
To configure an NTRIP connection, simply connect to an RTK capable GNSS device via Bluetooth, BLE or TCP from the QField settings positioning panel. Once connected, the NTRIP user interface will be visible just below the positioning devices combo box in the same panel.
From there, users can enter their NTRIP caster details and enable the connection. An NTRIP visual indicator has been added at the top of the map canvas positioning information panel overlay to reflect the status of the connection. A blue dot means everything’s working, a glowing orange dot means the connection has stopped receiving correction data, and a gray dot means the connection has turned off.
Moving onto another functionality that walks hand in hand with NTRIP: QField now supports connecting to external GNSS devices via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). This means a whole array of GNSS devices can now talk directly to QField on iOS as well, simplifying workflows for field surveyors working on this platform. While the benefit is most visible on iOS as QField previously lacked the ability to talk through Bluetooth altogether on that platform, BLE connections are also available on Android, Windows, and Linux. In many cases, it can offer a more stable connection.
The development of these fantastic features was supported by two QField hardware partners: HappySurvey and ArduSimple. Their support meant we were able to focus on getting the best possible experience running on their devices. Other hardware will definitively work out of the box too, and we’d love to hear about your experiences. However, since we are dealing with functionalities that are often driven by vendor-specific commands and UUIDs, there’s plenty of room to grow when it comes to compatibility. So if you’re a hardware vendor, feel free to reach out, join our certified hardware program and support QField’s growth! :)
Moving on to another noteworthy newly-added functionalities.
Starting with QField 4.2, the feature form includes a new gallery editor which shows previews of image, video, and audio content from relationships where the child layer has one or more attachment attributes. It will turn itself on automatically whenever QField detects this setup. The gallery editor also offers a quick snap button allowing for a much faster workflow around photo and video capture. And yes, we’ve updated our notes layer to support this when creating projects using QField.
Another feature form improvement is a wizard mode, which turns a complex set of tabs into a simple, linear flow guided by next and previous buttons that respond to constraints. driven by an easy to use pair of next and previous buttons that are reacting to constraints. The wizard mode is a per-project setting that can be enabled when setting up projects in QGIS. Simply make sure QFieldSync is installed to see the configuration panel in the project properties dialog.
Users enjoying QField’s recent addition of 3D views will be delighted by what’s coming next. Feature identification by tapping on the terrain in 3D map views is now possible. This removes the need to switch back and forth between 2D and 3D to do attribute editing or getting more information on a nearby point of interest during 3D-enhanced hikes through your favorite national park.
There are countless more improvements that would transform this announcement into a full on essay ;) to highlight a few more:
A new project information popup accessible via the side dashboard displays crucial project metadata such as the title, the abstract description, and the author(s).
The features list now reflects attribute table’s row conditional styling configured in QGIS, providing a nice way to add visual hints to make features in need of attention pop out in the list;
Audio attachments now show a level preview that helps identify key parts of a clip during playback.
Lines and polygons digitized using a stylus in freehand mode are now smoother with cleaner geometries containing fewer redundant vertices; and
As always, the full changelog is available over here for even more goodies.
This new version of QField is packed with QFieldCloud improvements. The biggest one is the retirement of the cloud projects ‘community’ tab in favor of a completely revamped – and we believe improved – experience around cloud project searching and filtering. Users can now easily filter projects by organization and teammate ownership as well as by keywords. The new user interface also makes searching through the countless cloud projects that have been made public by authors around the world far more intuitive.
A brand new cloud storage indicator has been added to QField to let users know of their current used and remaining storage size. This will help users keep on top of their storage and provide an early warning when space is about to run out. Upgrades are available for users to keep working on these growing cloud projects that were started using the free community plan .
Beyond that, we’ve been hard at work hunting bugs and increasing the overall stability. We’ve also transformed a number of obscure and intimidating error messages into helpful notifications.
The Coral Sea stretches across the southwest Pacific, bordered by Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu. Home to the Great Barrier Reef and some of the most biodiverse coastal ecosystems on the planet, it is also one of the most climate-pressured, with bleaching events and coastal change outpacing many monitoring programs.
Field workers across the region are already responding with QField: mapping seagrass and mangroves for blue carbon conservation with the MACBLUE project , building national environmental monitoring capacity through SPREP’s regional GIS training , running standardized tropical field data collection at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research , and driving land cover surveys across 10 Pacific Island nations through Digital Earth Pacific and the maplandscape project .
At OPENGIS.ch, the Coral Sea is a reminder that the places most in need of reliable field data are often the hardest to reach. That is precisely what QField is built for.
Happy field mapping!
Thanks to Mario Ame
Everything was working fine. I had just finished building the Grow Your Own allotments map, deployed it to the live server, and was feeling pretty pleased with myself. A few days later a friend messaged me that the map had stopped working. No regions, just a blank basemap. Checked the console and got this:
“Server returned no content-length header or content-length exceeding request. Check that your storage backend supports HTTP Byte Serving.”
Not the most helpful error message if you don’t know what you’re looking at. Fortunately Claude was able to work out what was happening and suggest a solution.
PMTiles is a clever format for serving vector map tiles — instead of thousands of individual tile files, everything is packed into a single binary file and the browser requests just the chunks it needs using something called HTTP byte-range requests. For this to work, the server has to serve the file uncompressed and report its exact size.
The problem was that Hostinger had apparently applied an automatic update that switched on Brotli compression for all static files. Brotli is great for HTML, CSS and JavaScript, it makes them smaller and faster to download but it completely breaks PMTiles. When the server compresses the whole file, it can no longer serve arbitrary chunks of it, and the whole thing falls apart. The fix was to add a few lines to the .htaccess file telling the server to leave .pmtiles files alone.
One gotcha, adding the fix to the root .htaccess wasn’t enough on its own. I also had to add a copy to the data/ subfolder inside each map project. Hostinger’s LiteSpeed server doesn’t always cascade rules reliably into subdirectories, I didn’t bother to try working out why.
If you’re hosting PMTiles on shared hosting and your maps suddenly stop rendering, check your response headers first. If you see content-encoding: br or content-encoding: gzip on your .pmtiles file, that’s your problem right there.
Learning – things go wrong unexpectedly, sometimes it is not your fault or even under your control (particularly if you have a shared hosting plan). Don’t panic.
The current outbreak of Ebola has inevitably triggered lots of maps of the outbreak, just search for “Maps of the Ebola outbreak in Africa” and you will find something like this.
Some of these are pretty good, some don’t communicate very well and a few are awful. My attention was drawn to a static map obviously generated by AI which was so so bad that it was laughable and you had to wonder why anyone share this without picking up the numerous obvious geographic errors.
I wondered what Claude could do so I asked it “can you make me a map image of africa showing all of the historic outbreaks of ebola labelled with the date and number of deaths. please ensure the data is accurate and reference the sources in the map legend” After 4 or 5 iterations to sort out the labelling (difficult because of the concentration of the outbreaks) I got this, which you can also view online:
Not perfect but a fair effort in 15 minutes.
Then I thought that since Claude had gathered the data from the CDC and WHO for this map, I might as well ask it to make a web map “could you make an interactive web using my standard settings that would provide more info in a popup for each incident. possibly with a time slider. use a separate data file that we can update as the statistics evolve“
Took a bit of fiddling to get everything working and a few tweaks to get the mobile UX working (removed the animation on the year slider) and job done, an hour and a half from start to finish. I was concerned having seen some AI hallucinations that the data might not be correct, I checked a few samples going back to the source data and it seems ok.
This a pretty simple map, the data is only 38 records (hopefully it doesn’t grow too much) and it was pulled together pretty quickly. I learnt a couple of things which should make this kind of simple map quicker to build in the future – remind Claude to use all of the parameters etc in its memory and deploy a copy to a live server early to test.
Sinds gisteren zijn ook voor de workshops op de FOSS4G-NL (op 8 juli) de tickets te koop. Voor de conferentie dag op 9 juli waren ze dat al, maar nu kun je dus in één keer je slag slaan voor 2 leuke & leerzame dagen. Ga naar https://www.foss4g.nl voor programma en ticketverkoop
• Tickets zijn 𝘱𝘢𝘺-𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵-𝘺𝘰𝘶-𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵. Je ziet in de shop wel een prijsvoorstel zodat de catering, banners en andere kosten die wij maken voor de organisatie netjes betaald kunnen worden. En extraatjes gebruiken we weer voor volgende (gratis) events. • Let er zelf op dat je niet voor 𝘨𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘫𝘬𝘵𝘪𝘫𝘥𝘪𝘨𝘦 workshops tickets koopt. • Doe ons een groot plezier, en koop je ticket bijtijds. Dan weten wij hoeveel broodjes we moeten smeren, hoeveel tafels en meters kapstok we nodig hebben etc.
My wife grows some vegetables in our back garden, she used to have an allotment but she gave it up and we dug up part of our grass. I got to wondering about allotments and whether they were a British phenomena or they were widely spread? Which countries have the most allotments, growing space per capita and the largest size of allotments?
I started out checking out OpenStreetMap to see how allotments were tagged (landuse=allotments) and then thought I would give Overpass Turbo (the web version) a try to download a sample. It seems that Overpass gets easily overloaded and I could only manage to download London allotments after 3 or 4 tries. Claude suggested using the QuickOSM plugin to download the allotments data but that still hit the same limits and it looked like I would have to download the UK in regions, a European or world map was not going to be easy. Scratching my head I reached out to my friends in the OSM community via mastodon saying “OpenStreetMap friends. Not being very technical, I’m struggling to use Overpass or turbo). I would like to download a global dataset of landuse=allotments (maybe in chunks) for a project idea. Can anyone help?” and pretty quickly Amanda McCann suggested Postpass “Postpass! It’s a global SQL database accessible over the web” and when I explained my lack of SQL skills she wrote me a query that extracted the world data set of allotments as points with the area of the polygon (which was all I needed) attached. A click and a bit of patience and I had a 90Mb file with 463,000 features.
Learning – reach out to people who know more than you, they are usually happy to help
Now, I was ready to start – find some boundaries, count and aggregate the points onto the polygons, add population count from a world pop raster and see what patterns emerge. Claude helped me to do the QGIS stuff, though I’m getting better at this without help. My big mistake was not to do a choropleth visualisation before starting to build my web map which meant I wasted a lot of time wrestling with a set of world admin boundaries when more than half of them had no data!
Learning – explore your data in QGIS or whatever tools you have to understand the patterns before you start building a web map, particularly if the data is large!
It turns out that either a lot of the world has no, or very few, allotments or, more likely,OSM coverage is more skewed to capturing allotments in Europe, Russia and the Former Soviet countries (more on that later).
I filtered my boundaries to Europe, Russia and FSU, and simplified them with MapShaper to reduce the file size but that was quite gappy with heavy simplification to get the file size down. Eventually I. used tippecanoe to do the simplification as part of building the pmtiles and that reduced a 200Mb geojson file to less than 6Mb pmtiles with good appearance at most view levels.
The app build was fairly simple, after I had decided what I wanted to show. Once I had the app running I decided to add country boundaries (I already had country data on m2/cap and average plot size attached to the regional polygons) as a visual layer over the region polygons. Getting the search for countries and regions to work took a few tries, I wanted country to come first followed by regions with priority given to strings at the beginning of a name but allowing ‘contains’, eventually I/Claude got there after a rethink.
Claude seems to be able to remember most of my preferences in map design and tech, it does mean the maps I am making are a bit samey and I may need to think outside of my own box in the future. On the other hand the simplicity of being able to build consistently and to a pretty good standard is great, for example the mobile UX now uses a slide up panel for info boxes, side panels or modals which I’ve used for the last 2 or 3 maps and seems to work pretty well.
Does the map show anything interesting?
When you look at the initial map of allotment space per person you can see a clear trend that the availability of allotments increases as you look eastwards. English regions have between 2 and 2.5 m2 of allotment per person while in southern Hungary there are between 100 and 300m2 per person, those are big differences. Go further east to Russia and you will see even higher ratios.
Switch to average plot size and you will see a very similar trend, the English regions have average plots of 1ha to 1.5ha, even London where space is at a premium had an average of 1.1ha which is slightly higher than the average for the whole of the UK. Head east and plot size increases, in south Hungary the average is between 25ha and 50ha, further east in Russia you will find a lot of regions with these higher averages of 25-50. 50 hectares is massive, it’s 500,000m2 (or 123.5 acres for the Brits reading this).
Andy Allan suggested an explanation for this eastwards trend. What people define as an allotment varies as you head eastwards, in Western Europe we have shared allotment areas with each individual plot being typically about 250m2 with a small shed and some rows of vegetables, in Eastern Europe the plots are larger and they might well include a small cabin with electricity and water where people could sleep over. Go further east into Russia and you might find large plots for a handful of summer residences or dachas which are barely what we understand as allotments. It’s a matter of classification and each country’s mappers have their own conventions.
A fun project to scratch an itch and I have learnt a bit about PostPass, Tippecanoe and pmtiles and OSM tagging thanks to Amanda, Claude and Andy (whose company Thunderforest provides most of my base maps).
Oslandia has been developing QGIS plugins for more than 15 years, and we would like to invite developers to webinar and discussion event Tuesday June 30th at 5pm (Paris time)
The goal is to share QGIS plugin developer’s experiences, our goals, habits and difficulties, as well as discuss available tools. This discussion will also be a good opportunity to share feedback on our experience as a developer, identify needs around QGIS plugins development, and explore ways to make the most of our development work.
Registration is free but mandatory. The webinar access link will be emailed to you after registration and a few days before the webinar : https://framaforms.org/webinar-discussion-panel-creating-qgis-plugins-in-2026-1780384809
Location: Remote (at least 4h overlap with CET)
Employment Type: Full-time (80-100%)
About OPENGIS.ch:
OPENGIS.ch is a team of Full-Stack GeoNinjas offering personalized open-source geodata solutions to Swiss and international clients. We are dedicated to using and developing open-source tools, providing flexibility, scalability, and future-proof solutions, and playing a key role in the free and open-source geospatial community. We pride ourselves on our agile and distributed nature, which allows us to have a motivated and multicultural team that supports each other in working together.
Job Description:
We are looking for a passionate and skilled Django Full-Stack Engineer who loves open-source and ideally brings experience in geospatial technologies. The ideal candidate will work primarily on Georama, our soon-to-be-published open-source and QGIS-based platform for geospatial data publication. You will help develop and maintain Georama, as well as deploy it to clients infrastructures.
Responsibilities:
* Take an active role in shaping the long-term vision and roadmap of Georama, contributing ideas and technical direction alongside the core team.
* Design and develop significant new features and functionalities, spanning both front-end and back-end.
* Develop, test, and maintain Georama using Django, Python, and other modern web technologies.
* Ensure the performance, quality, and responsiveness of the application.
* Identify and correct bottlenecks and fix bugs
* Help maintain code quality, organisation, and automation.
* Contribute to and engage with open-source communities around our core technologies.
* Possibly: optimise deployment pipelines, including Docker and CI/CD workflows on GitHub.
* Possibly: provide technical guidance and support to clients regarding deployment and usage of the platform.
Qualifications:
* Strong experience with Django and Python in a full-stack capacity.
* Demonstrated commitment to open-source. Contributions, patches, or active community involvement are a strong plus.
* Proficiency in front-end technologies, including JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3.
* Familiarity with geospatial concepts, web GIS applications, or QGIS is a significant advantage.
* Experience with Docker (Compose), Git, and relational databases (ideally PostgreSQL / PostGIS) required.
* Experience with DevOps practices (CI/CD pipelines (especially GitHub Actions), containerisation, and deployment) is welcome.
* Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to work independently as part of a remote-first team.
* Fluent in English. German and / or French a plus.
Questions for Applicants:
How to Apply:
If you are excited about this opportunity and meet the qualifications, please submit an application at opengis.ch/jobs
Join us at OPENGIS.ch and become a part of our mission to provide innovative open-source geospatial solutions! 
This blog post was written by an AI coding agent. Specifically, by opencode, a terminal-based coding assistant, running against a remote inference provider (OpenCode Zen) serving the opencode/big-pickle model.
The entire process took about two minutes. Here is how it went.
I opened a terminal, typed opencode, and when the prompt appeared I pasted the following:
Write a blog post about writing this blog post using this coding agent and a remote inference provider. Include this prompt and the name of the LLM model.
The agent then explored the codebase to understand the blog structure (it found Hugo with the Indigo theme, looked at existing posts for style and frontmatter conventions), asked a clarifying question about which provider to name, and produced this very file — complete with correct frontmatter, matching date format, and consistent URL scheme.
The model, opencode/big-pickle (nickname “big-pickle”), is running on OpenCode Zen, a remote inference service. It never touched the blog’s filesystem directly; every file read, edit, and write was mediated by the agent’s tool-use layer.
What strikes me is the inversion of the usual workflow. Instead of writing prose and then figuring out markup, I described what I wanted in natural language and the agent handled the rest. It knew to set author: strk, to use YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+00:00 for dates, to match the blog’s reference-style link convention, and to place the file under content/posts/ with the correct slug.
The agent’s exploration step was particularly revealing: it checked config.toml, read an existing post in full, and examined the directory layout before writing a single line. It even noticed that the blog uses HTML entities from the WordPress migration era.
This is Free Software eating its own dog food. OpenCode is released under the AGPL, and the model it talks to — while remote — is directed entirely by local, auditable tool calls. I can see every decision it made in the conversation log.
If nothing else, this post is a timestamp: as of May 2026, a terminal-based agent with a remote model can explore a codebase, infer conventions, and produce publication-ready content with minimal guidance.
The meta is strong with this one.
Editorial notes (added manually):
En la nueva versión de gvSIG Desktop, la 2.7, se han incluido tres herramientas que permiten crear geometrías de líneas y polígonos mediante rumbo y distancia. Para ello se han incluido tres funciones nuevas en el gestor de expresiones:
PointByAngle(geometría, distancia, ángulo)
donde “geometría” sería el punto desde el cual se insertaría la nueva línea (siendo “$p0” el último punto insertado, “$p1” el penúltimo…), “distancia” sería la longitud del segmento en las unidades de la vista, y “ángulo” sería el ángulo en grados sexagesimales. Por ejemplo PointByAngle($p0,10, 10) sería como se muestra a continuación, 10 metros con un ángulo de 10º sobre la horizontal.
$ADI(‘N o S-ángulo sexagesimal,E o W’, distancia)
donde el primer parámetro indica si es hacia el Norte o hacia el Sur, después se indica los grados sexagesimales, separando grados, minutos y segundos por “-”, posteriormente si es hacia el Este o hacia el Oeste, y finalmente la distancia. Por ejemplo $ADI(‘N-11–3-E’, 10) sería 10 metros de segmento, en sentido noreste, 11º 3’ en sentido horario desde el Norte.
PointByAzimuthAndDistance(origen, azimut, distancia)
donde el primer parámetro indica el origen (por ejemplo un punto con coordenadas, el último punto insertado -con $p0-…), el segundo si es hacia el Norte o hacia el Sur, después se indica los grados sexagesimales, separando grados, minutos y segundos por “-”, posteriormente si es hacia el Este o hacia el Oeste, y finalmente la distancia. Por ejemplo PointByAzimuthAndDistance($p0, ‘N-90–0–W‘, 10) sería, desde el último punto insertado, 10 metros de segmento, en sentido noroeste, 90º en sentido antihorario desde el Norte, por lo tanto totalmente hacia el oeste.
En el siguiente vídeo se muestra el funcionamiento de todas estas funciones:
Welcome to week one of my year's second eighteen week training program. I'm gearing up for a race that I've never run before, a long-standing one that is close to home: Steamboat Springs' Run Rabbit Run. The 50 mile course goes from the base of Steamboat Mountain, up Right-o-way, then up next to the Thunderhead Express lift, and then (as far as I can tell) up around Tornado and Buddy's Run to one of the chutes and onto the ridge just below Mt. Werner. 3,500 feet D+ (dénivelé, in French, or cumulative elevation gain) in the first 6.5 miles. From there it rolls through the high country to Rabbit Ears Peak and then returns along the same route. The total elevation gain is almost 9,000 feet. It doesn't climb quite as much as the 50 mile Quad Rock course, which I've finished three times, but is at higher altitude. I'm looking forward to it!
In week two, on May 30, I've got another chance to work on my race day cramps puzzle. I'm going to run Laramie, Wyoming's, Pilot Hill 25 kilometer classic for the first time. My friend Stefan, who has family in Laramie, has been recommending it to me for several years. Ruthie and Bea will be at an equestrian event in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that same day. After I finish, I'll drive east on I-80 to meet them and watch them ride.
Finally, here are the numbers.
10 hours, 2 minutes all training
15 miles running
3,090 feet D+ running (and treadmill)
I was diligent about doing my mobility and core routine, and running or biking each day, including an uphill climb and downhill ripper on Friday.
Filling a 4-year gap here! Did not find time to post itemized yearly overviews, plus other updates. And that while even more has been happening compared to the past "COVID-years". Will stick to highlights with a promise to add regular updates.
Below a brief overview of my professional life during 2022-2025.
Highlights of living and working in the Open Source Geospatial and OSGeo(.nl
|.org
)-world,
organized by "Theme".
TL;DR Main 2022-2025 highlights:
Expanding these highlights.
According to map5.nl customers we have a product to be proud of. I say specifically "we" as map5topo is developed together with top Dutch digital cartographer Niene Boeijen . The map5topo project started in April 2022 and is ongoing since.
So what is the map5topo map about? In short: it is a digital raster+vector map covering The Netherlands constructed with Dutch Open Data and deployed via web "mapping" services and apps. That is a mouthful, we'll break this up next. I often say to friends "...like Google Maps, but prettier and much more detailed".
We can spend many words here, but if you are curious, try the free demo .
These days, a digital map is created from "source data".
map5topo source data originates from Open Datasets like the Dutch Key Registries, Basisregistraties : BAG, BRT, BGT, BRK, ..., provided via Kadaster PDOK and from OpenStreetMap data. Our challenge was to combine all these datasets into one uniform data model. I think we did a nice effort: take "the-best-of" from each dataset, unification in feature classification, plus scale-based detailing. See the data design for details.
map5topo is provided commercially by map5.nl via standardized "tiled" web services like OGC WMTS , but also "XYZ" (Google/OSM tiles, a.k.a. Web Mercator) tiles. Currently, mainly raster (image) tiles, including "HQ Retina" (double density), but also experimental Vector Tiles.
Customers can integrate these maps into their applications. A well-known example is Wandelnet , a major hiking site in The Netherlands.
There's also various apps we provide , like the KadViewer , originally a pilot-viewer for Dutch Kadaster.
There is a free map5topo app for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets for both Android and Apple IOS like iPhone. Developed by Bart Louwers .
In the planning. Some repos are already open . Let me know if you like to co-develop.
I am supposed to be a veteran OSM-mapper, my profile registered in 2005! But for many years my mapping efforts were zero. But in recent years I picked up mapping again. Regular mapping like hiking paths, and specialized projects like Dutch buildings and addresses with the JOSM BAG Updater .
Mainly mapping in The Netherlands and Spain (latter see below). Over 17000 contributions in the last year now!
After renting homes three winters in the wonderful area of The Alpujarras (Andalusia), made the move to buy a small "cortijo", a simple whitewashed house.
What can I say? Landscapes, hiking, the people, the "fiestas", birds & wildlife, the food, are all "estupendo" as is said here. Working as a digital nomad is easy, internet providers are ok, there's even shared workspaces.
My Spanish language, a must here, is improving, following courses like Overal Spaans (recommended!) for B1/B2 level, plus a local conversation class organized by the village.
Spain is a huge country. Many rural areas like The Alpujarras are not mapped in great detail. Though there are still very active mappers in the area. From the beginning I started adding mainly new hiking paths, surveying with GPS via CoMaps . I also joined the Spanish OSM Community (OSM-ES), simply by joining the OSM-ES Telegram group and weekly video-meetups.
In Spain I learned to follow the Catastro Buildings and Addresses import processes and I am working on a possible SIOSE Landcover/Landuse import (WIP).
My gratitude goes out to Héctor Ochoa Ortiz who introduced me to the welcoming Spanish OSM community and helped along the way.
After having given a mobile OSM mapping workshop at FOSS4GNL Middelburg 2023 and talking to local people in my village, I got the idea to organize OpenStreetMap workshops here. We aptly named our group here "Mapas y Tapas". The idea being to eventually have Mapping Parties: meet in a bar, map on the streets and "en el campo", reconvene with drinks and the all-abundant "tapas". But first some education was required. I gave several workshops (see below) to learn mobile mapping with EveryDoor and StreetComplete . The latest workshops I even provided in Spanish (with some help of local friends)! Also some CoMaps instruction, as people get lost while hiking using Google Maps.
There is one website for these workshops, also for self-study:
alpumapa.xyz , or in Spanish at alpumapa.xyz/es .
Below conferences and meetups I attended in 2022-2025, in chronological order.
Below talks and workshops I provided in 2022-2025, latest first. A complete list of presentations is available.
"Mapeando con tu móvil para OpenStreetMap" - Válor - Granada - Spain - alpumapa.xyz/es (in Spanish) - [PDF Slides] .
"OpenStreetMap Mobile Mapping Workshop" - Maptime AMS July 2025 - alpumapa.xyz - [PDF Slides] .
"Natural Navigation Workshop" - Party Niene Jeroen - Unconference - July 12, 2025 - [PDF Slides] .
"Natural Navigation (plus some evolution of navigation)" - MaptimeAMS - Summertime Meetup - June 25, 2025 - [PDF Slides] .
"Mapas y Tapas. A personal story of starting a local mapping community in Andalusia, Spain" - MaptimeAMS - Springtime Mapping Party - April 16, 2025 - [PDF Slides] .
"Wie MapLibre und Vektorkarten die Welt übernehmen" - FOSSGIS 2025, Múnster, Germany - March 26, 2025 - abstract - VIDEO - [PDF Slides] .
"Docker for Geo Workshop - Provided March 2025" - [PDF Slides] .
"OpenStreetMap Workshops - Provided in Spain Feb 2025 - Alpumapa - Mapas y Tapas" - alpumapa.xyz - [PDF Slides] .
"Basisregistraties en OpenStreetMap mixen voor map5topo kaarten" - FOSS4G-BE-NL - Baarle - Sept 26, 2024 - [PDF Slides] .
"Melting Dutch open data and OpenStreetMap into a single schema" - MaptimeAMS - End of Summer Meetup - Sept 19, 2024 - [PDF Slides] .
"Travel with Locative Media" - MaptimeAMS - Summertime Meetup - July 11, 2024 - [PDF Slides] .
"pygeoapi mid-year update 2024" - with Tom Kralidis a.o. - FOSS4GE 2024, Tartu, Estonia - July 3, 2024 - [HTML Slides] - [Abstract] .
"Diving into pygeoapi" - FOSS4GE 2024, Tartu, Estonia - July 2, 2024 - Workshop (4h): using pygeoapi to cover publishing geospatial data to the Web, and using the API from QGIS, OWSLib and a web browser - [HTML Startpage] - [Abstract] .
"Doing Geospatial in Python" - FOSS4GE 2024, Tartu, Estonia - July 2, 2024 - Workshop (4h): introduction to performing common GIS/geospatial tasks using Python geospatial tools such as OWSLib, Shapely, Fiona/Rasterio, GeoPandas and common geospatial libraries like GDAL, PROJ, pycsw, as well as other tools from the geopython toolchain. - [HTML Startpage] - [Abstract] .
"map5topo - A New&Fresh Topographic Map of The Netherlands" - MaptimeAMS - Mapping the Future - October 12, 2023 - [PDF Slides] .
"map5topo - een nieuwe, frisse topokaart van Nederland" - FOSS4GNL Middelburg - September 14, 2023 - [PDF Slides] .
"OpenStreetMap: Slim de kaart editen met apps!" - Met Casper Kersten - FOSS4GNL Middelburg - September 13, 2023 - [Workshop Website] - [PDF Slides] .
"GeoHealthCheck - A Quality of Service Monitor for Geospatial Web Services" - with Tom Kralidis - FOSS4G 2023 - June 30, 2023 - [HTML Slides] - [Abstract] .
"pygeoapi project status 2023" - with Tom Kralidis a.o. - FOSS4G 2023 - June 30, 2023 - [HTML Slides] - [Abstract] .
"Diving into pygeoapi" - FOSS4G 2023 - June 27, 2023 - Workshop (4h): using pygeoapi to cover publishing geospatial data to the Web, and using the API from QGIS, OWSLib and a web browser - [HTML Startpage] - [Abstract] .
"Doing Geospatial in Python" - FOSS4G 2023 - June 26, 2023 - Workshop (4h): introduction to performing common GIS/geospatial tasks using Python geospatial tools such as OWSLib, Shapely, Fiona/Rasterio, GeoPandas and common geospatial libraries like GDAL, PROJ, pycsw, as well as other tools from the geopython toolchain. - [HTML Startpage] - [Abstract] .
"Additions to pygeoapi for Geonovum Tender (with GeoCat) - April 20, 2023 - Online - [HTML Slides] .
"map5topo - a New Topographic Map of The Netherlands" - Geomob Barcelona - November 22, 2022 - [PDF Slides] .
"Introducing map5topo - a new Topographic Map of The Netherlands" - Information Sessions - Oktober 5+6, 2022 - Online - [PDF Slides] .
"GeoHealthCheck - A Quality of Service Monitor for Geospatial Web Services" - FOSS4G 2022 - August 24, 2022 - [HTML Slides] - [Abstract] .
"Diving into pygeoapi" - FOSS4G 2022 - August 22, 2022 - Workshop (4h): using pygeoapi to cover publishing geospatial data to the Web, and using the API from QGIS, OWSLib and a web browser - [HTML Startpage] - [Abstract] .
"Doing Geospatial in Python" - FOSS4G 2022 - August 22, 2022 - Workshop (4h): introduction to performing common GIS/geospatial tasks using Python geospatial tools such as OWSLib, Shapely, Fiona/Rasterio, and common geospatial libraries like GDAL, PROJ, pycsw, as well as other tools from the geopython toolchain. - [HTML Startpage] - [Abstract] .
"GitOps and Containerisation for INSPIRE - April 21, 2022 - Online - Geonovum Operationeel INSPIRE Overleg - [PDF Slides] .
"GitOps and Containerisation for INSPIRE - Automation in Building, Testing and Deployment of Software Applications - February 4, 2022 - Online - European Commission - INSPIRE Maintenance and Implementation Group (MIG) - 68th MIG-T Meeting - [PDF Slides] .
"Enforcing Automation in Building, Testing and Deployment of Software Applications - January 24, 2022 - Online - Emerging approaches for data-driven innovation in Europe - [PDF Slides] - [Video Recording on YouTube] .
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by Peter Smythe (noreply@blogger.com) at May 25, 2026 09:53 AM
GeoServer 2.28.4 release is now available
with downloads
(bin,
war,
windows), along with
docs and
extensions.
Please note, this is a stable release of GeoServer providing existing installations with minor updates and bug fixes, provided shortly before the GeoServer 3.0 release.
GeoServer 2.28.4 is made in conjunction with GeoTools 34.4, and GeoWebCache 1.28.4.
Also note that for the last few months we have been unable to provide a Windows Installer due to an expired certificate to sign Windows builds, but we are working on a resolution. Please bear with us, or offer to help, if it is important to you.
Thanks to Peter Smythe (AfriGIS) for making this release.
This release addresses security vulnerabilities and is an important upgrade for production systems.
See project security policy for more information on how security vulnerabilities are managed.
Improvement:
Bug:
For the complete list see 2.28.4 release notes.
Community module development:
Community modules are shared as source code to encourage collaboration. If a topic being explored is of interest to you, please contact the module developer to offer assistance.
Additional information on GeoServer 2.28 series:
Release notes: ( 2.28.4 | 2.28.3 | 2.28.2 | 2.28.1 | 2.28.0 | 2.28-M0 )
Nine years ago, I ran a 18 km race in the hills north of Montpellier, France, part of a big three-day festival of races called Festa Trail. I have good memories of the event. The weather was great, it was more runnable than Trail Quillan, and one of the race organizers emailed me the day after I posted to express interest in my blog post.
I had some leg cramps at Festa Trail. Cramping is the subject of my next blog post, and scanning my previous posts for mention of cramps is what reminded me of my run around Pic St-Loup.
My first trail race was in Colorado, but running in France really got me hooked. The runners were super enthusiastic, the villages we ran through provided food, drink, and music, the courses were crazy steep and technical or very sloppy. Adventures, but safe ones, because the pompiers (firefighters and first responders) were always on the scene. The events were big! Hundreds or thousands of runners at some of them. In the years since, I've heard French people say that trail running has become too big, and I get it now, but nine years ago the scale and intensity of French trail impressed me.
Sorry, this entry is only available in French.
With the release of QGIS 4, the question of the QGIS release cycle is arising again for many users.
Among the most common:
The official QGIS roadmap page shows the current versions, along with a countdown to the next one.
I have attempted to simplify the QGIS release cycle, which can be unclear if you go too much into detail. Here is my perspective as a core QGIS developer, simplified to present the release cycle in a schematic way.
There are 3 types of QGIS versions:
The diagram below illustrates how these different versions are built and highlights their end-of-life.
A few additional details:
For each new release, feel free to check out the visual changelog in video form, for example the one for QGIS 4.0.
The visual and video changelog for each version is available on the dedicated page.
If you would like to contribute to QGIS, or if you have any other questions about QGIS, feel free to contact us at infos+qgis@oslandia.com
You can stay informed of Oslandia news through our newsletter, and follow us on LinkedIn.
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Last week I had a call with Professor Gavin Hollis who is writing about Shakespeare’s use of maps and coining the term mapp’ry – you can read a bit more about our conversation here. That conversation prompted me to think about Shakespeare’s references to places in his plays and what that might tell me about his understanding of the world at the end of the 16th century. I thought this would be quite simple but of course the devil is in the detail!
I started by downloading the Project Gutenberg complete works text file and then with a lot of help from Claude used spaCy NER (Named Entity Recognition) to extract candidate place names — produced 578 candidates requiring manual review, I manually reviewed and approved 288 places, added countries and then geocoded them using the OpenCage API and finally made manual coordinate fixes for ancient/mythological places (Ilium, Barbary, Corioles, Belmont).
Once I had a list of places referred to in Shakespeare’s plays I needed to extract the quotes with play names and act/scene references. This was challenging to say the least, some place names are also character names (particularly in the English historical plays), I needed to ignore dramatise personae sections and also distinguish scene settings from quotes. I ended up with 2,685 quotes and 153 scene settings across 288 places and 38 plays.
Having built a number of maps with MapLibre and Claude’s help I thought the map build would be easy but I had the neat idea to use a quill symbol as a map marker – hours of wasted effort! I don’t really understand why this would not work, when I decided to scrap the quill and use a standard circle symbol it just worked straight away. Later on I changed to a teardrop symbol with no problem. The rest of the map build was relatively straight forward although striving for very good (forget perfection) burnt some time. For this map I wanted a Shakespearian feel so I used Stamen’s Watercolour tiles via Stadia Maps, I think they look really nice, I added a black and white option as well.
As I tested, I kept discovering glitches in the data which I had to work through with a combination of python scripts, courtesy of Claude, and manual edits which were easier than solving edge cases in a script. The funniest of errors was Maidenhead – spaCy identified it as a place with 14 references but when I looked at the quotes they were all Shakespeare referring to virginity rather than a place!
I am getting better at this stuff but this map was much tougher than I had expected, mainly because of the data. I am pleased with the end result and I think it works pretty well. I particularly like the feature to search for a place or a play, if you select a play the map filters just the places mentioned in that play and zooms to its extents, you can then explore a sample of the quotes mentioning a place. I am sure you will find some humorous mistakes in place and quote extraction, send them to me and I will try to fix.
Ya está abierta en Uruguay la Convocatoria 2026 de la iniciativa “Geoalfabetización mediante la utilización de Tecnologías de la Información Geográfica (TIGs)”, una propuesta formativa que combina curso y concurso para impulsar el uso educativo de la cartografía digital, la georreferenciación y los Sistemas de Información Geográfica en las aulas.
La iniciativa está organizada por la Dirección Nacional de Topografía del Ministerio de Transporte y Obras Públicas de Uruguay, la Inspección Nacional de Geografía y Geología de ANEP-DGES y la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, con la colaboración de Ceibal, ANEP-DGETP y la Asociación Nacional de Profesores de Geografía.
El curso está dirigido a docentes de Educación Secundaria/Media y Técnico-Profesional de la educación pública, especialmente de Geografía y áreas vinculadas al conocimiento geográfico, ambiental y social. El objetivo es facilitar la incorporación de las Tecnologías de la Información Geográfica como herramientas para analizar el territorio, trabajar con datos geoespaciales y abordar problemáticas locales desde una perspectiva educativa y participativa.
gvSIG Batoví es un Sistema de Información Geográfica destinado a entornos educativos, surgido como una adaptación del software libre gvSIG Desktop. Su orientación didáctica permite acercar las TIGs al aula de una manera práctica, favoreciendo que docentes y estudiantes trabajen con información territorial y desarrollen proyectos vinculados a su realidad local.
Como continuación de la formación, se desarrollará el concurso “Proyectos de Geografía con Estudiantes y gvSIG Batoví”, cuyo propósito es incentivar el uso de las TIGs en espacios educativos. Los equipos estarán integrados por estudiantes, de 3 a 5 alumnos, y al menos un docente de referencia que haya participado en alguna edición del curso. Cada equipo deberá presentar un proyecto que identifique y aborde una problemática de interés local, con dimensión territorial y vinculada a alguno de los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible 2030.
Esta convocatoria representa una excelente oportunidad para seguir promoviendo la geoalfabetización, el uso de software libre y la aplicación de tecnologías geoespaciales en la educación. Desde gvSIG celebramos la continuidad de gvSIG Batoví como herramienta para formar nuevas generaciones capaces de comprender, analizar y representar el territorio mediante tecnologías abiertas.
Una de las tareas que realiza el Departamento de Topografía y Geomática del Ayuntamiento de Albacete es la de imprimir las fichas de las nuevas vías urbanas que se van creando en el municipio, tras la aprobación de su nombre por Pleno. Este trabajo se realiza directamente con las herramientas disponibles en gvSIG Online, desde la Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales del Ayuntamiento de Albacete, que lo facilita considerablemente.
En la última Jornada IDE en la Administración Local se mostró el nuevo visor de gvSIG Online, con multitud de novedades. Una de ellas es la de poder filtrar gráficamente sobre la vista, no solo sobre la tabla. De esa forma, se pueden realizar filtros en función de uno o varios campos, y que se muestren sobre el visor solamente los elementos filtrados.
Con esta nueva funcionalidad, y con una ficha de impresión personalizada, en la que se carga tanto información de la tabla de atributos, como ciertos datos personalizados, como la calle de inicio o de fin, o nombres antiguos de la calle, se pueden crear directamente las hojas de campo.
El primer paso es el de realizar un filtro sobre la nueva calle y aplicarlo para que solo se visualice dicho eje de calle:
El siguiente paso es el de seleccionar la leyenda creada específicamente para las hojas de campo donde se resalta la calle:
Finalmente se ejecuta la herramienta de impresión, seleccionando la plantilla creada específicamente para las hojas de campo, en formato A3, de forma que se abre un formulario para rellenar los datos que no se extraen de la tabla de atributos.
De esta forma se pueden crear las fichas personalizadas en pocos segundos desde el propio geoportal.
We are extremely pleased to announce the nine funded proposals for our 2026 QGIS.ORG grant programme. Funding for the programme was sourced by you, our project donors and sponsors! Note: For more context surrounding our grant programme, please see: QGIS Grants #11: Call for Grant Proposals 2026
These are the proposals:
As usual, we provide a summary of the proposal discussions.
Due to the high quality of proposals and since the budget situation allows us to increase the grant programme budget, we are happy to announce that all proposals that passed the discussion phase will be funded and that there is no need for a voting this year.
On behalf of the QGIS.ORG project, I would like to thank everyone who submitted proposals for this call!
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation would like to open nominations for
the 2026 Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software.
The Sol Katz Award for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial
(FOSS4G) will be given to individuals who have demonstrated leadership
in the FOSS4G community. Recipients of the award will have contributed
significantly through their activities to advance open source ideals in
the geospatial realm.
Solomon ‘Sol’ Katz was an early pioneer of FOSS4G and left behind a
large body of work in the form of applications, format specifications,
and utilities while at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. This early
FOSS4G archive provided both source code and applications freely
available to the community. Sol was also a frequent contributor to many
geospatial list servers, providing much guidance to the geospatial
community at large.
Sol unfortunately passed away in 1999 from Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, but
his legacy lives on in the open source world. Those interested in making
a donation to the American Cancer Society, as per Sol’s family’s
request, can do so at https://donate.cancer.org .
Nominations for the Sol Katz Award should be sent to solkatzaward at
lists dot osgeo dot org with a description of the reasons for this
nomination (after sending, please wait for the moderator to accept your
message). Nominations will be accepted until end-of-day 10th July
Anywhere on Earth. A recipient will be decided from the nomination list
by the OSGeo selection committee.
The winner of the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source
Software will be announced virtually during the FOSS4G 2026 event in
Hiroshima, Japan. The hope is that the award will both acknowledge the
work of community members, and pay tribute to one of its founders, for
years to come.
It should be noted that past awardees and selection committee members
are not eligible.
Past Awardees:
2025: Nyall Dawson
2024: Tom Kralidis
2023: Howard Butler
2022: Sandro Santilli
2021: Malena Libman
2020: Anita Graser
2019: Even Rouault
2018: Astrid Emde
2017: Andrea Aime
2016: Jeff McKenna
2015: Maria Brovelli
2014: Gary Sherman
2013: Arnulf Christl
2012: Venkatesh Raghavan
2011: Martin Davis
2010: Helena Mitasova
2009: Daniel Morissette
2008: Paul Ramsey
2007: Steve Lime
2006: Markus Neteler
2005: Frank Warmerdam
Selection Committee 2026:
Jeff McKenna (chair)
Frank Warmerdam
Markus Neteler
Steve Lime
Paul Ramsey
Sophia Parafina
Daniel Morissette
Helena Mitasova
Martin Davis
Venkatesh Raghavan
Arnulf Christl
Gary Sherman
Maria Brovelli
Andrea Aime
Astrid Emde
Even Rouault
Anita Graser
Ariel Anthieni
Sandro Santilli
Howard Butler
Tom Kralidis
Nyall Dawson
1 post - 1 participant
The GRASS GIS 8.5.0 release provides more than 2750 improvements and fixes with respect to the release 8.4.2. Enjoy!
The post GRASS 8.5.0 released appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.
Desde QGIS España os invitamos a participar en un nuevo workshop técnico sobre Qtiler, un innovador servidor WebGIS basado en Node.js y PyQGIS orientado a la publicación rápida y eficiente de servicios OGC directamente desde proyectos QGIS.
Durante la sesión, impartida por Abel Gonzalez (desarrollador principal de Qtiler y fundador de MundoGIS), veremos cómo publicar proyectos .qgs y .qgz como servicios WMS, WFS y WMTS, además de revisar la arquitectura de la plataforma, su interoperabilidad con clientes GIS y un taller práctico de instalación y despliegue.
Fecha: Miércoles 20 de mayo Hora: 15:00h
El enlace de acceso al workshop será enviado a las personas inscritas el día previo al evento.
La versión 2.7 de gvSIG Desktop incluye una mejora muy interesante en los mapas, que es la de poder personalizar los cajetines. Hasta las versiones anteriores, solo permitía insertar un cajetín con un número de filas y de columnas concretas, donde todas tenían el mismo tamaño, por lo que la única forma de crear cajetines personalizados era creando los rectángulos de forma individual, que hacía que fuese más complejo.
Con la nueva herramienta, una vez se inserta el cajetín con un número de filas y de columnas, existe la opción de editar dicho cajetín, de forma que se pueden combinar celdas, o dividirlas horizontal o verticalmente, permitiendo así tener celdas de diferentes tamaños para poder insertar la escala, el título, el logo de nuestra entidad, nuestra firma, etc.
En este vídeo se muestra su funcionamiento:
QGIS Camp España 2026 es solo posible gracias al esfuerzo de las empresas e instituciones. Si estás interesado en patrocinar el evento puedes descargarte nuestra guía para patrocinadores
Location: Remote, preferably with at least 4h overlap to CEST office hours
Employment Type: Full-time (80-100%)
About OPENGIS.ch:
OPENGIS.ch is a team of Full-Stack GeoNinjas offering personalized open-source geodata solutions to Swiss and international clients. We are dedicated to using and developing open-source tools, providing flexibility, scalability, and future-proof solutions, and playing a key role in the free and open-source geospatial community. We pride ourselves on our agile and distributed nature, which allows us to have a motivated and multicultural team that supports each other in working together.
Role Description:
We are looking for a DevOps Engineer to design, build, and operate scalable, secure, and reliable infrastructure. You will play a key role in improving automation, system resilience, and deployment workflows, enabling fast and stable delivery of our applications.
Infrastructure & Automation
CI/CD & Delivery
Systems & Operations
Database & Data Protection
Security & Reliability
Collaboration & Support
Perks:
At OPENGIS.ch, we enjoy a variety of perks that make our work experience rewarding. Here’s what we get:
Questions for Applicants:
How to Apply:
If you are excited about this opportunity and meet the qualifications, please submit an application at opengis.ch/jobs
Join us at OPENGIS.ch and become a part of our mission to provide innovative open-source geospatial solutions!
From 14th - 17th April, I was fortunate to be able to attend GISRUK 2026, at the University of Birmingham. GISRUK is a regular feature in my calendar and it’s a great opportunity to see what is happening in the world of GIS Research, catch-up with old colleagues and make new connections.
For me, this conference was quite application focused, which I really enjoyed. It’s great to see what GIS can do, as well as learning about new methods and techniques.
Ed Parsons kicked-off the conference with a great keynote, talking about how we, as geographers, can make a difference. He got us thinking about what are the real world problems we can solve - a useful reminder that while the research is important, application is important too.
I also really loved his Russian Doll AI explanation - while Generative AI is “the new big thing”, it is all just statistics and many of these terms (Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence) are all part of Data Analytics - which we have been working with in GIS for many many years.
We also heard from the conference chairs, Emma Ferranti and Sarah Greenham about their work with WM Adapt and wider applications in their current research projects.
This was followed by two great presentations from Adam Nudds and Si Chan Lam at the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA). Adam is a graduate of Uni of Birmingham, and part of the great links the university has with local government. Si reflected on how his many hundreds of hours playing Sim City 2000 prepared him for a role in Local Government (!)
With Adam, he provided some great food for thought on how we as GIS Researchers can make GIS more accessible and useful to decision makers. Often they want two sentences - but they also want confidence in the research behind those two sentences. PowerBI as a business tool also cropped up a couple of times with the tension of decision makers and non geospatial analysts wanting to use PowerBI, and the GIS experts wanting to use a more full featured GIS. I would say both tools can be useful and it’s worth seeing how we can bridge the two. Si and Adam are trying to make a showcase of GIS tools to show what we can do with GIS for the decision makers in WMCA.
It was also great to hear critical thinking mentioned several times, when using data, particularly IMD. Many many studies use IMD, particularly when they are looking at impacts on people. However, not many critically evaluate their use of it. Fortunately, Emma Ferranti reminded us in her presentation that when they use it, they ask - does it provide enough information and does it identify the people it needs to? Also Luc Wilson reminded us that IMD is often treated like fact, but it isn’t necessarily fact - remember the Ecological Fallacy!
The discussion also went beyond IMD, and Alex Singleton reminded us that while we have to define many aspects to be able to analyse them - he was looking at vulnerability and cash access - the definition of vulnerability is subjective so no one measure captures everything.
Bivariate maps are also now in! They were featured in at least three presentations including Fulvio Lopane and Johara Meyer, who did a great visualisation of picking out just certain groups in her presentation and highlighting them both on the map and in the legend.
The second keynote was a fantastic presentation from Gemma Davis and Claudia Offner from MapAction. MapAction provides mapping for humanitarian emergencies, often sending small teams to provide on the ground support directly after humanitarian emergencies. Gemma and Claudia shared their experiences providing support on the ground, highlighting how important maps are as a common communication tool in this setting. For me, a big highlight was that printed maps are still key - part of their kit is a plotter to create bigger than A3 maps, which form a key part of the planning and operations aspect of any aid response.
While printed maps are key, mobile phones are a massively useful tool too. They also highlighted two key tools they often used. Firstly, KoboToolbox as a geospatial enabled survey app, allowing responders to collect data in the field (without a data connection) and easily upload that data when they have connectivity. They also highlighted the ubiquity of WhatsApp, with local communities using it to coordinate their response. This is great, but it’s hard to integrate this with knowing what is happening where on a map. A new tool, Hot ChatMap, enables anyone to import a WhatsApp (or Telegram, Signal, etc.) chat and create a basic map showing all the locations shared and any related images. This is really helpful to work out what is happening where, and to share that data.
Another aspect I picked up from the conference is the importance of making the application of your work clear. Some presentations did this very very well, making technical aspects and applications clear to those in the audience who are not necessarily experts in that particular field.
While in some years at GISRUK we have been inundated with papers using social media data, this year there was only one - Nurwatik Nurwatik presenting - Incorporating Topology on GPT-Based Geoparsing Model for Finer Geocoding Locations from Social Media Texts. This was a fascinating discussion on using GPT-based technology to improve geoparsing - i.e. understanding how people talk about location in social media text.
Similarly there have been previous years where you could more-or-less follow the whole conference on Twitter - pre Elon Musk of course - but now, the conference only had a few mentions on LinkedIn during the conference - and nothing I could see on Twitter (X), Bluesky or Mastodon. There were a few nice summary posts after the conference, including these ones from Emma Ferranti, Harry Kirby, Lenka Hasova, Ferdous Rababa and many others.
We had a great conference dinner at The Exchange in central Birmingham, a venue owned by the university. There is currently an exhibition called Helios, about the Sun, with a giant model sun hanging from the ceiling - quite a stunning setup. Alongside a variety of public engagement spaces (including one on WM Adapt featuring Emma Ferranti!) The Exchange is also an old bank, and you can tour the vaults downstairs. No gold left unfortunately! But some quite spectacular vault doors:
I was also attending as a judge for the GISRUK & OSGeo:UK GoFundGeo Award, presented a GISRUK presenter who presents a tool or technique that has potential for wide uptake in the open source geospatial (OSGeo) community. We had a great selection of entries, and the final decision was hard. We finally settled on Chenrui Xiao who presented Wheely Easy: Creating a Wheelability Network for Bradford. Thanks to all those on the judging panel who helped me.
Finally, I’d also like to say well done to the other GISRUK prize winners:
GISRUK was a great opportunity to meet GIS academics and researchers, and anyone interested in the developing field of GIS. Next year we will be in Nottingham and I hope to see some of you there.
If you ever want to talk about GIS Training, or whether GIS could be used in your project, I’m always open to a discussion. Please contact me to find out more!
La agrupación formada por ENXEÑERÍA FORESTAL ASEFOR, S.L., FINANCIERA
MADERERA S.A., FORTOP TOPOGRAFÍA S.L.U. y GEOMATICO S. COOP.
GALEGA. ha obtenido apoyo en el marco de la convocatoria NEXOS 2025,
promovida por la Axencia Galega de Innovación, para el desarrollo del proyecto
CUBia: Cubicación inteligente – Investigación avanzada en cubicación
descentralizada con arquitecturas híbridas LiDAR-SLAM / LiDAR-UAV-ALS / IA y
tecnologías disruptoras cuánticas (Quantum Reservoir Computing, QRC) para un
nuevo paradigma en la predicción forestal.
La iniciativa CUBia es un proyecto pionero en Galicia y en el ámbito nacional que
busca transformar progresivamente la forma en que se estiman y gestionan los
recursos forestales a través del uso combinado de tecnologías LiDAR-SLAM y
LiDAR UAV-ALS, inteligencia artificial y enfoques innovadores basados en módulos
experimentales de computación cuántica (QML/QRC).
El objetivo principal es desarrollar y validar un sistema de cubicación forestal
inteligente que permita sustituir el inventario manual tradicional, que supone un
importante esfuerzo en términos de recursos empleados y cuenta con limitaciones
significativas en cuanto a cobertura territorial y precisión, por un sistema digital,
descentralizado y remoto, ligado a la captura de datos mediante sensores
avanzados. Estos datos serán procesados mediante algoritmos de inteligencia
artificial, lo que permitirá llevar a cabo una modelización predictiva que será validada
con datos reales de fábrica.
De esta forma, se busca sentar las bases de un nuevo paradigma en la gestión de
los recursos forestales, mejorando la competitividad del sector maderero a través de
esta nueva generación de inventarios digitales, transferibles y escalables, con
márgenes de error controladas y directamente aplicables a la toma de decisiones, en
un marco de sostenibilidad, economía circular y transparencia en la cadena de valor
forestal.
Durante su ejecución, el proyecto investigará soluciones para la caracterización de
masas forestales comerciales mediante tecnologías LiDAR, desarrollará y validará
modelos predictivos dentro de un sistema de aprendizaje continuo, explorará
enfoques experimentales de computación cuántica e integrará este sistema en una
plataforma de cubicación digital que facilitará el uso, y promoverá la transferencia y
trazabilidad de los resultados.
Subvencionado por la Agencia Gallega de Innovación de la Xunta de Galicia y
cofinanciado por la Unión Europea.
Nº expediente: IN852A 2025/04
Socios: ASEFOR, FINSA, FORTOP, GEOMATICO
Subcontrataciones: Universidad de Vigo, ITG
Colabora: MEDRAR
Fecha de inicio: 01/11/2025
Fecha finalización: 30/09/2028
Presupuesto del proyecto: 1.248.009,60€
Importe de la ayuda: 724.802,08€
I was anticipating a good day at Quad Rock and instead I flopped. I finished in 8:14:46. 186th out of 209 finishers, my poorest place at this race by a big margin. And I'd expected to match, if not exceed, my previous best. What explains this fiasco? My major problem was acute leg muscle cramping, but there were some minor issues as well.
In the week before the race I did my mobility and core routine every day and ran 15-30 minutes per day. I ate and slept normally, which is to say, well. Instead of feeling fresher and fresher, I started to feel stiff and irritated all over. My right Tibalias Anterior and Peroneus Longus, the muscles on the shin and outside of the lower leg, were particularly tight and tender starting on the Thursday before the race and continuing into the eve of the race. I did a small set of 20 second hill sprints on the street around the corner from home on Thursday and felt okay. My shakeout run on Friday afternoon, however, sucked. I never got very comfortable and the strides I attempted were a chore. I was a little dismayed by this, but let that feeling go, figuring that I was likely to feel better on Saturday.
Saturday morning I ran the first mile very easy, then picked up the pace in the second to jump some places before we hit the first single track. In the first half mile of the single track I made about five short bursts to pass slow groups and find people who were running at my target pace. Soon after this, we started uphill and I started to get negative feedback from my legs. Not cramps yet, but a lack of energy, like I'd felt on Friday. I'd felt better on the same climb a week before in my last uphill workout.
I kept a steady enough pace up Towers, and wasn't passed by anyone, but began to go backwards on the first descent. My legs felt tight and fragile. I lost contact with the folks with whom I'd climbed Towers and a few places heading down to the 10-mile mark, Horsetooth Mountain Trailhead.
The next seven miles after the aid station were a complete disaster. I experienced calf cramps that stopped me cold, and shin and foot cramps that made it hard to stand at all. I was passed by 54 runners, about 2 runners per minute, before I reached the Towers aid station. I tried salt. I tried stretching. I had to lie on the dirt at Towers for 15 minutes before I could continue. 3:22 of that was spent listening to "Rock Me Amadeus" on the aid station's sound system, which gave me life and saved my race.
I fumbled my way down Mill Canyon to Arthur's Rock aid station at mile 17, three hours after leaving the Horsetooth aid station. I laid down in the shade to stretch and slowly put myself back together. After 15 minutes, I felt like I could continue, if not quickly. The cramps were fading, but my legs were shot from the involuntary contractions. As if I'd done squats and deadlifts to the point of muscle failure.
During the last seven miles of the race, I caught up with runners who were in their first Quad Rock, or first trail race of this distance, and it was fun to pre-celebrate with them, pump them up, share stories, and remind them that we were going to be finishers, if only because there was nowhere to drop out before the finish. I was feeling a lot better at this point. The last climb up Howard was hard but not the end of the world. I managed a good amount of easy running on the last descent to the finish.
The cramps reminded me of my experience at the Bear 100 in September 2025, except that they hit me sooner at Quad Rock, at 10 miles instead of 17 miles. I've been analyzing my data, memories, and notes to find things about the races that were common or different. And, now that I think about it, it was calf cramps that brought me down at mile 21 at Never Summer 100K in July 2023. I've got a problem with cramping that hasn't been solved by physical therapy or judicious amounts of hard running. It's going to be an interesting problem to work out.
In the end, I did finish, and feel pretty satisfied about that. I haven't crossed a race finish line since July of 2023, almost three years ago. Breaking a streak of three DNFs (2023 Bear 100, 2025 Never Summer 100K, 2025 Bear 100) felt good. The weather was good, the trails were fine. I ran with friends for a while and saw other friends at aid stations. It wasn't all torture. I smiled and laughed quite a bit.
Biggest thanks to Ruthie for driving me and Stefan to the start, taking our drop bags to Horsetooth, and for picking me up at the finish. Thank you, everyone who offered me help on the painful cramping trip. And thanks to Nick and Brad, and all you race volunteers. Everything about this race was top notch, except my legs.
UPDATE 14th May 2026
Thanks to Harry Wood I discovered that 3,000 of the 45,000 pubs in the FHRS dataset had no coordinates and were not showing on my map. Particularly embarrassing was the omission of the Sutton Arms which is a Geomob after event favourite for geobeers. It was relatively simple to rectify this as all but 6 of the missing records had a postcode that could be used to geocode using postcodes.io. Then I had to rerun the count of pubs per constituency, update the pubs per 10k population and rerun the generalisation of the boundaries – easy enough but an hour wasted.
Learning: Even if your dataset is too large to thoroughly inspect, 5 minutes spent scrolling through it, running a couple of sorts and doing some kind of sanity check is time well spent.
There has been quite a bit in the news recently about 2 pubs per day closing according to the British Beer and Pub Association. That got me thinking about which areas of the country were best served and where were the dry zones? Nearest Pint, shows pub density per 10,000 population across every parliamentary constituency in Great Britain.
The first challenge was finding a reliable pub dataset. My initial instinct was to use OpenStreetMap, which I expected to have excellent coverage of pubs given the map parties that end up in a pub. I used Overpass Turbo to download (amenity=pub) and found around 19,000 pubs across the UK — a significant undercount. According to the BBPA, there were approximately 45,000 pubs in the UK in 2024, so OSM was capturing fewer than half of them.
The discrepancy makes sense when you think about it. OSM contributors apply a fairly personalised definition of what counts as a pub, whereas the official figure includes working men’s clubs, hotel bars, sports club bars, and other licensed premises that serve alcohol but might not fit the classic pub image. OSM mappers, quite reasonably, tend to tag only what is clearly and obviously a pub.
A much better source turned out to be the Food Standards Agency’s Food Hygiene Rating Service (FHRS), which requires all food and drink premises to register — including pubs, bars and nightclubs. The GetTheData Open Pubs dataset, derived from FHRS, gave me just under 50,000 premises across England, Scotland and Wales, a figure much closer to industry estimates. Northern Ireland was excluded, it operates a separate food hygiene scheme, and the FHRS data doesn’t cover it.
With a fairly good pub locations dataset, the next step was assigning each pub to a parliamentary constituency and calculating density. I used QGIS to get a count of pubs per constituency and calculate the number of pubs per 10,000 people. The boundaries and population figures came from ONS. The one glitch was that the boundary files were very high resolution, I used MapShaper to aggressively thin the boundaries while retaining the topology – super neat tool, much better than trying to do in QGIS processing toolbox.
What the map shows
Traditional pub heartlands in northern England — particularly Yorkshire, County Durham and Lancashire — show the highest densities, with some rural constituencies reaching 15–20 pubs per 10,000 people. Coastal and rural constituencies in the South West also score highly, perhaps reflecting their tourist economies. Liverpool Riveride has the highest pub density at 23.73 pubs per 10,000 with a total of 277 pubs!
At the other end of the scale, outer London constituencies consistently show the lowest pub densities in England, despite the city having large numbers of pubs in absolute terms. Dense residential populations in areas like Barking (1.35), East Ham (0.76) and Slough (1.31) dilute the per-capita figures significantly. East Renfrewshire in Scotland ranks last among all 632 constituencies at just 0.73 pubs per 10,000 — only 7 pubs for a constituency of nearly 100,000 people.
Click any constituency to see its name, pub count, population, density and ranking. Zoom in to see individual pub locations. Use the 🏆 rankings button to browse constituencies from highest to lowest density and click any row to fly the map to that constituency or use the locate me button to see pubs near you which is always useful.
Se você utiliza o QGIS no seu dia a dia, sabe que os plugins são os “superpoderes” que expandem as funcionalidades do software. No entanto, com grandes poderes vêm grandes responsabilidades — e a necessidade de segurança.
Recentemente, a equipe do QGIS anunciou uma atualização vital no blog oficial: o Repositório de Plugins agora conta com ferramentas automáticas de segurança. Vamos entender por que isso é um marco para o nosso ecossistema favorito.
A mudança é fruto da QEP 409 (QGIS Enhancement Proposal). O foco aqui não é burocratizar a vida de quem cria, mas sim elevar o padrão de confiança. Agora, todo plugin enviado ao repositório oficial passa por um scanner automático de vulnerabilidades.
O que o scanner procura? Basicamente, práticas de risco, como exposição de chaves de API (o pesadelo de qualquer dev!), bibliotecas obsoletas ou métodos de codificação que podem abrir brechas para scripts maliciosos.
Ao navegar pelo plugins.qgis.org, você notará ícones coloridos ao lado das versões dos plugins. Eles funcionam como um semáforo de integridade:
| Selo | Significado | Ação Recomendada |
| 🟢 Verde | O código passou nas verificações críticas sem alertas. | Pode usar com tranquilidade! |
| 🔴 Vermelho | Foram detectados alertas que precisam de revisão do desenvolvedor. | Atenção redobrada (leia abaixo). |
Importante: Por enquanto, esses selos são visíveis apenas no portal web. O gerenciador de plugins dentro do QGIS Desktop ainda não exibe esses alertas, mas isso deve mudar em versões futuras.
Se você abrir o repositório agora, pode parecer que houve um apocalipse digital: muitos plugins populares estão marcados em vermelho. Calma, não jogue seu computador pela janela!
Como diria Douglas Adams:
Don’t Panic.
O escaneamento foi feito de forma retroativa. Um selo vermelho não significa necessariamente que o plugin é um vírus. Na maioria dos casos, indica que o desenvolvedor usou uma biblioteca antiga ou um padrão de código que o novo scanner considera “suspeito” por precaução. A expectativa é que a comunidade leve cerca de um ano para “esverdear” todo o repositório.
Se você contribui para o ecossistema QGIS, o jogo mudou um pouco (para melhor):
Essa atualização é um passo gigante para manter o QGIS como a ferramenta líder em geoprocessamento opensource no mundo. Garantir que o código que rodamos em nossas máquinas (muitas vezes em ambientes corporativos rígidos) seja seguro é essencial para a sobrevivência do movimento opensource.
E você, já conferiu se os seus plugins favoritos estão “no verde”? Se encontrar algum erro em plugins que você desenvolve, aproveite para dar aquele update preventivo!
