Category Archives: Magazine
Fire Season Preparedness: GIS Powers Southern California Sheriff Departments’ Evacuations
The deadly Los Angeles wildfires that claimed 30 lives, destroyed 15,000 structures, and burned 37,000 acres in January 2025 forebode Southern California’s year-round risk. Rugged terrain, fierce winds, and prolonged drought have made more intense fire occurrence the new normal—and unified first responder coordination a matter of life and death. At least four million California residents live in...
GEO-MEASURE: Survey-Grade RTK Precision at a Consumer Price
Powering the next wave of accessible GNSS For decades, survey-grade GNSS rovers occupied the top tier of the market—tools of immense precision, relied upon by surveyors and engineers, but locked behind prohibitive costs, complex configurations, and subscription models that often strained the budgets of small firms, municipal teams, or independent operators. Parallel to this world,...
Jack Dangermond’s Vision for the Future
The geospatial industry is moving through a period of profound transformation. Advances in reality capture, artificial intelligence, and cloud integration are converging with urgent global challenges, from climate resilience to urbanization. In this moment, few figures are as influential as Jack Dangermond, founder and CEO of Esri. For more than fifty years, he has guided...
Topcon 2.0: Reclaiming the Geomatics Frontier
For decades, Topcon has been a trusted name in precision optics, GNSS receivers, and machine control. Its equipment became a familiar sight on survey crews, construction sites, and agricultural fields across the globe. Over the past decade, the company leaned heavily into high-growth sectors such as machine control and precision agriculture, expanding its presence in...
The Essential Instrument Gets Smarter
Just when you thought there was nothing new in the world of Total Stations… Appearances can be deceptive. If you’re thinking that this is just another total station, you might be pleasantly surprised by the following look under the hood. But why a new total station? Didn’t the technology of such instruments peak in the...
Fixposition’s Vision-RTK Pro + Esri Is a Game Changer
The streets of modern cities are lined with glass and steel, forests close their canopy around remote infrastructure projects, and construction zones sprawl across bridges, tunnels, and high-rise footprints. These are not exceptions but the everyday environments in which surveyors and mapping professionals work. Yet in these very settings, the bedrock of their craft—centimeter-level GNSS...