Geographer, oceanographer, and Esri Chief Scientist Dr Dawn Wright has written this article in ArcNews about why Artificial Intelligence (AI) needs to be digitally resilient. Because Dr Wright discusses the data implications of AI, this article has great relevance to the readers of the Spatial Reserves GIS data blog. ”As we build and use GeoAI, we must consider who is training it. Who is building the user interfaces and for what kinds of users,” states Dr Wright at the outset, which touches on our oft-mentioned theme in this blog about “know your data”.  What does Dr Wright mean by digital res ..read more

The Climate Trace portal represents one of the latest independent 2D and 3D data viewers and data libraries. Recently, it published an updated inventory at fine granularity that pinpoints nearly every major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions around the world and provides independently produced estimates of how much each emits. Encompassing human-caused emissions from facilities — including power plants, steel mills, ships, and oil refineries — and other emitting activities — including fertilizer application, deforestation, and wildfires — Climate TRACE’s expanded database now tracks GHG ..read more

The Esri Landsat Explorer app (https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/landsatexplorer) from Esri has been re-released, updated, and improved. Because this is such an amazing tool and data set, we have written about the Landsat Explorer several times in the past on the Spatial Reserves data blog, such as here, but good news! The Landsat Explorer has been recently upgraded with a new interface and with new data. With it, you can instantly analyze more than 500,000 Landsat 8 and Global Land Survey (GLS) orthorectified, cloud-minimized scenes, offering global coverage with over 500 new scenes added every ..read more

A list of the 100 best GIS blogs and websites has been published, here: https://tech.feedspot.com/gis_blogs/ [tech.feedspot.com]  As a key theme of Spatial Reserves is to be critical of any data, the title of “the top 100” should at least raise eyebrows. Whose “top”? What about others’ “top” lists? But after examining the resource, I learned about some new and useful resources, and was reminded of resources I had forgotten about. Yes, there are a few ads, but it is worth spending time with this resource and I salute its authors for doing some very good homework and research to compile it ..read more

Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft and Azure Data’s new unified data analytics platform, responsible for gathering a range of data toolsets (some of which already exist in the Azure product set) under a single umbrella. This article asks data users to “think of it as a single solution to crunch numbers and deliver insights.” The goal of Microsoft Fabric is to enable business and data professionals to unlock the potential of their data for the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Fabric has been revolutionizing the way data is interpreted and has been making analytics accessible to everyone, not jus ..read more

The Colorado Geospatial Portal (https://geodata.colorado.gov/) allows both trained GIS professionals and members of the general public to discover geospatial technology across the state. The site includes a spatial data portal, a map viewer to visualize various datasets, links to state and federal geospatial partners, and open resources such as trainings. The goal of the site is to provide a centralized location for all GIS users to find data, explore applications, or find contacts for their own purposes. As a longtime resident of Colorado, I can attest to the vibrancy of the GIS community her ..read more

Our guidelines about “modern strategies for finding geospatial data” has just been updated. Why? To keep it modern! GIS portals, tools, the open data movement, and societal expectations continue to evolve; hence, the need to update this essay. This essay serves as a guideline and a short course that you could take yourself, teach others, or share with colleagues. Updates include videos that were recorded while one of us taught a recent workshop on this topic, and also a section on using ChatGPT to find data! I recently taught a course with the content described in this essay.  The course ..read more

In June 2023, ArcGIS Online released with a new data integration capability, Data Pipelines. This application, currently in beta, provides a workbench User Interface to import and clean data from cloud data stores, such as AWS and Snowflake, read files such as CSVs, GeoJSON, and other formats. Once you have connected to your data, you can engineer the data to a desired state and then write the data out to a feature layer. This new feature in ArcGIS Online is central to the themes of this Spatial Reserves data blog and I trust will be of interest to our readers. According to my colleague’s post ..read more

A recent session organized by the Data Ethics Working Group of the CODATA (for more information, see  https://codata.org/initiatives/working-groups/data-ethics/ [codata.org] ) at the SciDataCon 2023 and International Data Week 2023 should be of interest to the readers of this blog and our book. CODATA is the Committee on Data of the International Science Council (ISC).  CODATA exists to promote global collaboration to improve the availability and usability of data for all areas of research.  CODATA supports the principle that data produced by research and suscepti ..read more

The Open Geospatial Consortium recently published progress and an update of their document on “Spatial Data On the Web–Best Practices”, here: https://www.w3.org/TR/sdw-bp/ which I believe is relevant reading for the community of readers of this blog and anyone interested in spatial data–particularly those who are hosting data. The purpose of the document are as follows: This document advises on best practices related to the publication of spatial data on the Web; the use of Web technologies as they may be applied to location. The best practices presented here are intended for practitioner ..read more