Geospatial strategy, research, design and consulting
In the last few years we’ve seen a huge increase in the prevalence of class of computational tools labelled as “AI” – or Artificial Intelligence. Increasingly in 2025/26 there has been an uptick in the concept of “GeoAI” – applying these tools to geospatial and geographic problem spaces. They’ve come with an incredible hype cycle… Read More » “No” is a good way to limit “AI” risks.
This is a story about data principles – specifically one component of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles. Most of the things in the FAIR list are pretty straightforward, and most people agree on what findable means. Accessible is a little contentious – views sit on a spectrum between “chuck it on an… Read More » The bicycle model of interoperability
I’ve been working around sea ice for close to two decades on and off – and have had the privilege of being up close and personal with floating chunks of frozen ocean in both the Arctic and Antarctic. An enduring geophysical question about sea ice is “how much ice floats on the ocean?” Sea ice,… Read More » Identifying deformed sea ice using geomorphons
This demonstrates a method for counting trees using a backpackable mini drone, and a completely open source workflow. If you like it / find value in it, feel free to press the donate buttons at the bottom of this page – or get in touch for larger, longer term projects. What is the rationale for… Read More » Counting trees in sparse woodland with OpenDroneMap, PDAL and QGIS
A quick update – the Spatialised online store is back! This time refocused on cartographic things, starting with some halftone design work featuring some of my favourite mountains. Places you might not always see on a print. As always, buy responsibly! Quick links to all the products in store are given below. I’m also open… Read More » The Spatialised store is back
Part 1 of this series looked at how to fly drones and collect imagery for mapping over a small property. Part 2 showed use cases for a digital elevation model. This story focusses on the georeferenced imagery produced in the process. It will look at three use cases – and explain some of the limitations:… Read More » Mapping a small farm part 3: using an aerial orthophoto
This is the first sequel to Mapping a small farm part 1. To summarise the first story, it walks through flight planning and practice, then data processing to get some first cut products, and a bit of mapping to show ideas about how accurate we think the product is. The products we’re interested in now… Read More » Mapping a small farm part 2: microhydrology
This story calls back a long way to my mapping roots. I started out making scientific maps using the venerable Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) to plot bathymetry, ship tracks, sampling stations. Almost two decades later, I’m still making maps with code! However, this time it’s in Python – with some helpers. Here’s the end product… Read More » Cartography as code: Cartopy
Sometimes we don’t need to create full blown orthophotos and 3D models to understand things. Just seeing an image in a location context is enough. With this in mind, I was recenly tasked by Taungurung Land and Waters Council to collect a set of baseline images along preset transects for ecological assessment. The transects were… Read More » Image transects for ecological assessment
Tools used: QGIS 3.34.3 Prizren; Inkscape 1.2, a web browser Most of this is reasonably standard ‘get data, make maps’ – you can flick straight to cartographic magic for the un-standard parts if you want! This map was featured in WeeklyOSM Europe, number 707: https://weeklyosm.eu/archives/17032 The product Brief and design choices The brief for this… Read More » Route mapping using Strava,…