Category Archives: Cartography
GISCorps Seeks Executive Director to Build on Two Decades of Humanitarian Service
The volunteer-driven geospatial organization is recruiting its first paid executive director as founder Shoreh Elhami prepares for a leadership transition. GISCorps, the humanitarian GIS volunteer program of the Geospatial Professional Network (GPN), is seeking its first paid executive director to help guide the organization into its next chapter. Founded in 2003 by GIS professional Shoreh...
Agentic AI Has to Know Where It Is
Esri’s distinguished product manager for geospatial AI has been shipping AI inside ArcGIS since the ArcMap era. A conversation after this year’s User Conference covers the real difference between an AI assistant and an agent, why Esri built its own governance board around the distinction, and what MCP actually solves for a profession that can’t...
Pix4D’s Platform Moment: From Photogrammetry Engine to Enterprise Reality
Fifteen years into the UAV software revolution, Pix4D’s CTO sees Gaussian splatting, AI-assisted editing, and the smartphone-as-surveying-instrument converging into something bigger than any single tool. When Pix4D was founded in 2011 as a spin-off from EPFL’s Computer Vision Lab in Lausanne, the pitch was essentially this: drones are coming, and someone has to turn the...
The Image as Evidence
Time-stamped, location-aware imagery has quietly crossed a threshold from documentation to trusted record. The geospatial profession is now in the business of producing evidence — and the standards have not caught up to the stakes. A surveyor flying a bridge deck, a GIS technician cataloging post-storm damage, a mapping firm delivering obliques to an insurer:...
Seeing Through the Water: Inside Leica’s CoastalMapper
The new four-channel bathymetric sensor redefines what airborne hydrographic surveying can cover — and how fast Airborne bathymetric lidar has always been a physics argument. The physics are largely fixed: green laser light at 532 nanometers penetrates water in ways that infrared does not, but the water column itself attenuates the signal, and the degree...
Why 3D Fuels Modeling Is Now a Geospatial Problem
As wildfire planning demands better inputs, the challenge is shifting from data collection alone to how vegetation and surface fuels are measured, classified, and turned into model-ready 3D information. Wildfire is forcing a shift in geospatial thinking. High-resolution capture is no longer the finish line. The harder question is whether vegetation and surface-fuels data can...