The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, earth observation and digital geography - Podcasts

60:33

Smart Point Clouds: What If Every Point Knew What It Was

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/10/01

Point clouds still feel a little bit like magic to me. You walk through a room, a city, or even just your living room with a scanner or your phone, and you can recreate it afterwards. But on their own, point clouds aren't actually that smart. So what would it mean for every single point to know not just where it is, but what it is, and how it relates to everything around it?My guest this week is Dr. Florent Poux, an adjunct professor, director of the 3D GeoData Academy, and author of 3D Data

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37:59

Cloud-Native Geospatial for Small Teams

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/09/23

Cloud-Native Geospatial for Small Teams: How the Utah Geological Survey Did ItWhat happens when a small, technical team at a state agency decides to go cloud native? They don't have terabytes of satellite imagery. They have lots of small datasets, lots of scientists and lots of people who just want to get at the data. In this episode, I talk with Marshall Robinson and Clinton Lunn from the Data Management Program at the Utah Geological Survey. They moved from a traditional ArcGIS Server setup to

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48:07

GERS, Metadata, and Maps Built for Machines

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/09/17

We already have a map. Actually, we have lots of maps. So why did Overture build another one?My guest in this episode is Amy Rose, CTO of the Overture Maps Foundation, and she makes a pretty compelling case. Overture isn't trying to replace OpenStreetMap — it sits downstream from it, and from hundreds of other sources, doing the unglamorous work of standardising all of that into something you can actually put into production. A light touch, as Amy puts it. Enough structure to be usable, not so much

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54:59

The Evolution of Positioning Systems

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/09/09

Republished Episode - I wanted to resurface this episode because positioning is everything, and it's a great overview of how it works.Right now you are being bathed in radio signals from about 35 satellites, each one 20,000 km away, and every one of them is weaker than the noise floor of the receiver trying to hear it. That is GNSS, and it is the only technology on Earth that can tell you where you are in an absolute sense. Sandy Kennedy runs applied research for autonomy and positioning at

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28:21

Sentinel Bird

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/09/07

Earlier this year I ran a small experiment called the Geospatial Launchpad — six weeks of working closely with a couple of people to help them push their geospatial projects forward. West was one of them.His project is Sentinel Bird (sentinelbird.com): an archive of every Sentinel-2 visit over the Gaza Strip since 2015, with 10-meter resolution imagery for each district, interactive comparison sliders, change-over-time timelapses, and a downloadable press pack — all free, no accounts, no paywall,

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43:35

Fields Of The World

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/08/18

Where does one field end and the next one begin? It sounds trivial right up until you try to answer it.In this episode, I'm joined by Hannah Kerner — Assistant Professor at Arizona State University, AI Lead for NASA Harvest and NASA Acres, and Research Advisor for Taylor Geospatial — to talk about Fields of the World. This episode is sponsored by the Cloud Native Geospatial Forum. The CNG Forum 2026 runs October 6–9 at Snowbird, Utah — three days of real-world cloud-native geospatial (STAC, COGs,

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49:27

Virtual Worlds for Physical AI Systems

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/08/04

In this episode I'm joined by Apurva Shah, co-founder and CEO of Duality AI, a company building virtual worlds — or "world models" for robots and physical AI systems.Apurva's path here is an unusual one. He spent most of his career in animation, first at Pacific Data Images (which later became DreamWorks) and then over a decade at Pixar. His co-founder, Mike Taylor, comes from the other end of the spectrum entirely: a controls engineer who led field robotics at Caterpillar, deploying house-sized

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43:14

GPS, But 100 Times Stronger

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/07/29

My guest today is Tyler Reid, co-founder and CTO of Xona, a company building the first commercial satellite navigation system.We get into why Tyler and his team are moving satellites into low Earth orbit and what that unlocks. Stronger signals that can penetrate indoors, more resilient timing infrastructure, and better security against jamming and spoofing. GPS sits 20,000 kilometres out. Xona sits at 1,100, with signals around 100 times stronger and a planned constellation of 258 satellites. Tyler

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55:59

Turning Aerial Imagery Into a Searchable World

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/07/28

Vexcel isn't a household name — but you've almost certainly used their data. This aerial imaging company flies low-elevation aircraft across roughly 45 countries, capturing imagery at 7.5cm resolution from five different angles (straight down plus four oblique views), building one of the richest geospatial datasets on Earth. In this episode, Daniel talks with Steve Lombardi, VP of Product at Vexcel, about what happens after the pixels are captured. They dig into object detection and "elements"

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38:03

Cloud Native for the Rest of Us

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/07/20

What happens when you take cloud native geospatial out of the satellite-and-petabyte world and drop it into a small city with no budget and the world's slowest internet connection?In this episode, Daniel talks with Nissim Lebovits, a city planner turned geospatial data scientist, about his nine months in Argentina building climate risk tools for under-resourced municipalities. Nissim breaks down what "cloud native" actually means in practice (hint: it's really about ease of access), why range

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41:56

Mapping With 360 Cameras

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/07/15

Jeffrey Martin is the co-founder and CEO of Mosaic, a company building 360-degree camera systems designed specifically for mapping. He's been obsessed with 360 imagery for over 20 years — he built one of the first websites combining panoramic images with a map back in 2005, before Google Street View existed, and he holds a Guinness World Record for a 320-gigapixel image of London stitched together from 52,000 photos. In this episode, we get into what a modern mapping-grade 360 camera actually looks

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54:15

Who Pays for Open Source?

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/07/01

Open source software runs a huge chunk of the geospatial world — but somebody still has to pay for it. In this episode I sit down with Marco Bernasocchi creator of QField and CEO of OpenGIS.ch, to dig into the awkward question most open source projects avoid: how do you keep something free and open while paying real people to build and maintain it? Marco has been in the open source world since 2007, and he's grown QField into a tool with over two million downloads and a team of 14 behind it. We talk

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44:18

The Great Retooling

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/06/23

Ian Schuler is the CEO of Development Seed — the team behind a lot of the open source tooling that quietly holds up the geospatial world. He's been at the helm for over a decade, and in this conversation, we dig into what he calls the great retooling: the idea that cloud-native geospatial is about to flip from an emerging pattern to the dominant one, and that AI is the thing tipping it over the edge. The argument is simple — agents want to discover your data, query it, transform it, and hand back an

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66:33

Earth Observation - The Invisible Industry

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/06/17

What is Earth observation, really — and why, after fifty years of satellite imagery, is it still not "mainstream"?In this episode, I'm joined by Aravind Ravichandran, founder of TerraWatch, an independent research and advisory firm focused entirely on Earth observation. Aravind writes the TerraWatch newsletter, runs the EO Summit, and spends his time thinking about the strategy and economics of the industry more deeply than just about anyone. We start with a deceptively simple question — is Earth

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61:54

10 Tools for Telling Stories With Maps

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/05/28

Ryan Shields has one of the most interesting careers in geospatial — from remote sensing for conservation in the Caribbean, to disaster response data engineering with FEMA, to his current role turning spatial data into animation assets for Johnny Harris's YouTube channel at New Press.In this episode, Ryan counts down the 10 tools he's using right now to tell map stories that reach millions of viewers. We cover Felt, PostGIS on Crunchy Bridge, Geo Layers 3 for After Effects, CShapes for historical

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50:56

Agents, Guardrails, and the Death of the Dashboard

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/05/14

Nadine Alameh is back — former CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium, and now CEO and co-founder of Lunate AI, a six-month-old company sitting right at the messy intersection of geospatial and AI.In this conversation, Nadine breaks down the three types of clients she's seeing right now: government agencies standing at the edge of the river, wondering whether to jump in, startups from outside the geospatial world stumbling in with big ideas, and organizations that know they need to modernize but

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50:14

How HOT Is Rethinking Drone Mapping

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/04/30

What happens when you put professional-grade aerial mapping in the hands of the people who actually live in the places being mapped?In this episode, I'm joined by Rebecca Firth, Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) — a global community of around 750,000 people building free and open-source maps in the places that need them most. We dig into HOT's Drone Tasking Manager: a tool that lets local residents, using low-cost consumer drones, capture professional-quality aerial

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38:31

Common Space

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/03/22

This episode examines the Common Space initiative, a non-profit project dedicated to building and launching high-resolution optical satellites designed specifically for humanitarian purposes, such as aiding populations at risk from climate events and conflict. Although there are over a thousand Earth observation satellites currently in orbit, high-resolution imagery remains largely inaccessible to humanitarians, journalists, and civil rights groups due to high costs, restrictive licensing, and the

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49:20

AI in QGIS

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/03/05

I've been playing around with a lot of large language models lately, and it is absolutely fascinating to watch them work. But what happens when you bring that directly into QGIS?Right now, AI in the geospatial industry is a lot like a fast, enthusiastic new intern, incredibly helpful, and sometimes completely wrong, but improving at a rate that no human can compete with. As we hand more of our geoprocessing tasks over to these algorithms, and computing becomes more pervasive, are our own GIS

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46:52

Geospatial Makers Start Buildng!

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote... ·

2026/02/11

Geospatial Product Swiss Army Knife1. The "Build It and They Won't Come" Trap We have all seen it: a talented geospatial professional spends months—perhaps years—perfecting a technically sophisticated web map or a niche data service, only to release it to a deafening silence. In our industry, the "build it and they will come" philosophy is a fast track to zero traction. Precision is the enemy of progress when it is applied to the wrong problem. Daniel and Stella Blake Kelly explored a remedy for

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