A guide to public domain spatial data and societal issues
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Of the thousands of essays over the past two years surrounding AI and its implications are some very thought provoking ones with enormous implications for GIS. Some of the essays are around the theme of people creating their own internal-to-their-organization software. In other words, they are not just experimenting with AI tools, but they are […]
It has become increasingly obvious that a rising interest exists across many disciplines in the social aspects of GIS, and we have written about many societal topics in this blog space over the years. This interest is aided by rising interest in all aspects of technology, particularly in our AI infused era. One manifestation of […]
The Internet Society has created and hosts an intriguing, useful course entitled “Digital Footprints” which I think would be of interest to the readers of our Spatial Reserves Data & Society blog: https://www.internetsociety.org/learning/digital-footprints/. We have written about location privacy many times over the past 13 years in this space, including, “is it a legitimate concern?“, […]
The development of a beta version of an Item Details assistant in ArcGIS Online, I believe, will greatly aid in creating metadata, and subsequently help people make smarter decisions about whether data are “fit” for their use. Read more about the item details assistant, here: https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-enterprise/announcements/introducing-item-details-assistant-beta According…
My longtime colleague Joe Francica recently touched on a key topic in the Spatial Reserves blog space: How spatial data is accessed and processed: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/planet-labs-nvidia-eliminated-my-job-took-40-years-joe-francica-tcr7e/ Joe describes, “Nvidia is reshaping the traditional model of downloading raw data to ground stations and using NVIDIA IGX Thor and Jetson Orin…
Not long ago I was proud to be cited as the Biggest Map Nerd in the World in “Chris The Producer’s” video on mapping a missing city in Google Street View. That video, located here: https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com/2026/03/09/mapping-a-missing-city-in-google-street-view/ touched on much broader discussion about areas that are mapped and areas that are not mapped in Google Street […]
The federal data field guide is a new comprehensive guide to US federal data, and because it contains some true gems and unexpected surprises with regards to geospatial data, I believe it will be of great use to the readers of Spatial Reserves. The purpose of this guide is to “provide a more complete context […]
Way Back – 1990s.When I conducted GIS and GPS workshops back in the 1990s, when I worked at the USGS, I used to rejoice when our position was within 100 meters of our plotted location on our GIS. Yes, 100 meters! I know it sounds like the “stone age” but we were grateful to be […]
The On The Map tool https://onthemap.ces.census.gov/ from the US Census Bureau provides a wealth of data and maps to examine. As a former geographer at the US Census Bureau, I love all things census and demographic data, and this is one of my all time favorite resources they have created. I have taught with this […]
As we have advocated many times in this blog space for over a decade, a bit of time spent researching data resources up front can save much time later. This especially matters when you are up against a project deadline (and as we all know, this is *most* of the time). As we have also […]
