This week we begin rolling out recordings from #CNG2025. First up: @opencholmes.bsky.social on "Towards a Global Spatial Data Ecosystem." As Chris states: "We have the tools and people we need to make a huge impact...as long as we do it together" ▶️ youtu.be/IA9ZvXOnPZ0 New videos dropping weekly!

[CNG 2025] Towards a Global Spatial Data Ecosystem – Chris Holmes (Keynote)

YouTube video by Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum

youtu.be

Japan Earth Observer (JEO) newsletter #5 is out. There is news on Japan's space, EO, and geospatial industry in April + a deep dive on space-related items in the defense budget; JMoD is going shopping for satellites www.japanearthobserver.com/jeo-5-jmod-g...

JEO 5 - JMoD Goes Shopping

A monthly news roundup and a deep-dive on the Japan Ministry of Defense (JMoD) space-related budget.

japanearthobserver.com

File under "things you can do, but probably shouldn't". An app that converts time slices of a netcdf to pngs and then combines those into a video overlaid on map, 100% in browser. smoke-video.netlify.app #geosky #geography #gischat

Example app showing how to create time lapse videos, in browser, at dynamic resolution, all from the same files. Click somewhere to generate a video. cog-video.netlify.app #geosky #geography #gischat

With today's Zarr Python release, switch to the new obstore-based backend for **3x faster** reading from S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure than the default fsspec backend. zarr.readthedocs.io/en/stable/us... developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

The first Cloud-Native Geospatial Conference is happening in three weeks! I'll be giving the opening keynote, and I'm working to make it one of my best talks ever. The agenda (2025-ut.cloudnativegeo.org#agenda) is incredible, but there's also going to be lots of space between the talks...

Day 1 in the books from the Satellite Tasking API #STAPI sprint 2025 in Lisbon! We've got four sprint groups: - spec - frontend - software - vendor implementations Watch github.com/stapi-spec/ for all the changes! Organized by @element84.com, hosted by @developmentseed.org, and sponsored by #aws

I'll be at the Cloud Native Geospatial Conference (2025-ut.cloudnativegeo.org), talking about using GPUs for geospatial workloads. Let me know if you have any experience or interest in this and would like to chat.

🥳 @qgis 3.42 has landed in #condaforge https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/qgis My favorite way to install #QGIS #conda #gischat #python #opensource

SatCamp Tickets are Live! Join us for SatCamp 2025: Resilience Through Uncharted Terrain! 📍 Boulder, CO | Sept 24-26 🎟️ Register now: satcamp.xyz Let’s shape the future of geospatial together! 🌍🔥 #SatCamp2025

SatCamp 2025

SatCamp is a conference unlike anything you have ever attended. September 24-26, 2025. Boulder, Colorado, USA.

satcamp.xyz

As we push adoption of stac-geoparquet, we've found some cases where we might want to store multiple collections in the metadata. I made a light RFC here, if you're intersted: github.com/stac-utils/s... #stac

[RFC] Multiple collections in metadata · Issue #88 · stac-utils/stac-geoparquet

The spec currently describes how to store a single collection in the metadata: stac-geoparquet/spec/stac-geoparquet-spec.md Lines 72 to 77 in 121f648 ## Including a STAC Collection JSON in a STAC G...

github.com

damn this is a good article from @pketh.org pketh.org/the-human-to...

Is anyone up to test my geoparquet downloader qgis plugin? We want to change the directory in the latest release, which means migrating users from the old plugin to the 'new' one. If you could try out github.com/user-attachm... and let me know how it works I'd appreciate it.

🌶️ pixi.sh is the easiest and fastest way to install #QGIS on Ubuntu (maybe Mac too) right now if you need access to GeoParquet and DuckDb formats and python libraries for plugins 🧵 #gischat

We've published 118,678,424 open-data field boundaries so far. The boundaries have been collected from different open data portals, in different formats, and are now published in a single format. If you're creating farmer software solutions and need field boundaries, use them to your advantage...

Chris Holmes@opencholmes.bsky.social · last yr.

I'm incredibly pumped that we'll be launching 'phase 2' of the TGE initiative that lead to Fields of The World (fieldsofthe.world) and fiboa (github.com/fiboa). And I'd like to invite you to join us! See tgengine.org/tge-innovati... for the full post, and read on for some more information.

All open source is political. Even Rouault – archetypal GIS "random person maintaining the code that supports all modern digital infrastucture" – commited to GDAL github.com/OSGeo/gdal/p... - will now print "Trans rights are human rights" with `--version`. #gischat 🏳️‍⚧️👏🏼🏅

Add a GDAL_RELEASE_NICKNAME define by rouault · Pull Request #11865 · OSGeo/gdal

GDAL is an open source MIT licensed translator library for raster and vector geospatial data formats. - Add a GDAL_RELEASE_NICKNAME define by rouault · Pull Request #11865 · OSGeo/gdal

github.com

Just published a post on new features in the GeoParquet Downloader QGIS Plug-in I've been working on, see cholmes.medium.com/new-features... The most exciting thing to me is that a majority of the new enhancements have come from outside contributors.

New Features of GeoParquet Downloader QGIS Plugin

Many new improvements have landed recently, from a variety of contributors, turning this plug-in to a true open source project

cholmes.medium.com

I'm incredibly pumped that we'll be launching 'phase 2' of the TGE initiative that lead to Fields of The World (fieldsofthe.world) and fiboa (github.com/fiboa). And I'd like to invite you to join us! See tgengine.org/tge-innovati... for the full post, and read on for some more information.

It turns out the demise of the geo-blog has been greatly exaggerated. Blog-like content has been hiding in plain sight and it may be needed now more than ever. blog.geomusings.com/2025/02/16/l...

Long-Form Spatial Writing

I can’t remember the exact time that I met Paul Ramsey in person and had a conversation with him – it was either at the 2011 FOSS4G in Denver or the inaugural FOSS4GNA in DC the followi…

blog.geomusings.com

I'm incredibly pumped that we'll be launching 'phase 2' of the TGE initiative that lead to Fields of The World (fieldsofthe.world) and fiboa (github.com/fiboa). And I'd like to invite you to join us! See tgengine.org/tge-innovati... for the full post, and read on for some more information.

This is a great package, I need to use it more. Love the stac-geoparquet support, especially leveraging DuckDB.

Pete Gadomski@gadom.ski · last yr.

just moved stacrs, my no-dep Python package for working with #stac, to the stac-utils org: github.com/stac-utils/s... stacrs is meant to be a compliment, not a replacement, to existing packages (e.g. PySTAC) right now, it can read+write+search stac-geoparquet (searching via DuckDB) more to come!

We're seeking funding to take @source.coop to the next level.

I just published a blog post sharing some videos on how to make a QGIS plugin with AI coding tools: cholmes.medium.com/learn-how-to... I've been having great fun with it, so wanted to help demystify the process for anyone curious, and hopefully inspire more people to add cool stuff to QGIS!

Learn how to make QGIS Plugins with AI coding tools (video)

A couple of videos to help demystify the process of using AI coding tools like Cursor to create QGIS plugins.

cholmes.medium.com

Helping start Fiboa (github.com/fiboa) and Fields of The Worlds (fieldsofthe.world) as part of TGE's first Innovation Bridge is easily the thing I'm most proud of contributing to last year. Read this great blog post summarizing what happened: tgengine.org/innovation-b...

Innovation Bridge 2024 Wrapped: A collaboration to build a global dataset using AI and satellite imagery - Taylor Geospatial Engine

tgengine.org

You, yes you, can help the Cloud Native Geospatial Movement! Have you benefitted from Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF’s? SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs? Zarr, COPC or GeoParquet? And the ecosystem around them? Learn how to give back in my post: cholmes.medium.com/you-yes-you-...

You, yes you, can help the Cloud Native Geospatial Movement!

Have you benefitted from COG’s, STAC, Zarr, COPC or GeoParquet? Join us in Utah for the first CNG Conference and help just by attending.

cholmes.medium.com

New release of obstore: the simplest, highest-throughput Python interface to S3, GCS & Azure Storage! - Pickle support, to unblock usage in Dask and Zarr - Easier one-line store creation - Open remote objects as file-like readers or writers - Improved docs developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

Releasing obstore 0.4! - obstore

The simplest, highest-throughput Python interface to S3, GCS & Azure Storage, powered by Rust.

developmentseed.org

I finally found the time to write up my experience using AI-coding tools to create the QGIS plugin I made a couple months ago to make it easy to download Overture Maps Foundation, Source Cooperative and other GeoParquet data. Read it at: cholmes.medium.com/coding-qgis-...

Coding QGIS Plug-ins with AI coding tools

Following up on my last post, I wanted to share some more details about the experience of using AI tools to code a plugin for QGIS, one…

cholmes.medium.com

We are excited to introduce Kepler.gl 3.1, including enterprise-grade features like an embedded @duckdb.org Engine, an LLM Assistant for visual analysis with support for OpenAI, DeepSeek AI and local Ollama models, and PM Tiles support: location.foursquare.com/resources/bl...

I'm updating the GeoParquet website with the latest tools and data. See new version at e2958fef.geoparquet-github-io.pages.dev and diff at github.com/geoparquet/g.... What am I missing? I added duckdb, kepler gl, felt, atlas, big query, overture. @kylebarron.dev - do you have a rust library now?

Does anyone have good experience using the US National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) dataset? I'm contemplating translating it into GeoParquet to make it easier to download portions of it. But it's got a ton of tables in the GeoPackage - do people use all of those? Or is there a key subset?