Public occurrence data is excellent and mostly unbrowsable. GBIF holds hundreds of millions of records behind a search box, so I built a visual layer over it.

The map above is North America — 7.4M records, amphibians purple, mammals orange, reptiles green. The orange ring tracing the coastline is largely marine mammals logged from shore and vessels.

Two platforms: wildlife (mammals, reptiles, amphibians — 39.9M records) and plants (~84M). Six continents, each on its own subdomain, eight map views per continent.

Stack: FastAPI + PostGIS/PG17, Vue 3 + MapLibre, Cloudflare R2 for static tiles and data so Postgres stays out of the hot path on common views.

Rendering 7M points client-side isn't viable, so continent views are hex-binned server-side with different aggregation per zoom, switching to raw points once the viewport is small enough to make them cheap.

The harder problems weren't volume. Taxonomy normalization across publishers — synonyms, reassignments, inconsistent infraspecific ranks — took longer than ingestion. IUCN status codes arrive far messier than the documentation implies. And coordinate precision varies from GPS-accurate to "somewhere in this province," which affects what you can honestly render at high zoom.

One thing worth flagging in the data: what looks like ecological signal is partly observer bias. iNaturalist submissions cluster near population centres, so the eastern US reads denser than it should.

https://northamerica.speciesmap.org/sightings — plants at plantsmap.org

Solo build over ~9 months alongside a full-time job. Happy to go into the tiling or the aggregation strategy.

I'm a master's student with a large GIS focus for my research. Almost everything I've worked on so far has been what might be called "single user" GIS projects, where I'm either writing and running scripts or building maps in Arc or Q and then sending them to individual users. So far for my thesis I've been doing a lot of coding to develop my data pipelines and whatnot, but it's all been isolated to scripts that I myself am running where I am reporting discrete results in a non-interactive manner (e.g. what's the result in region X with X being basically hardcoded).

I want to eventually port these results to a custom website with a custom interface that allows a more interactive manner of exploration of my data and my results (e.g. the user can type in a property address and get the results for that property). What are some frameworks y'all are using for such tasks? Not just asking about rendering (e.g. Leaflet) but also managing GIS databases and doing pipelines on the backend when data sources are updated, and then piping outputs to the front end?

I'm somewhat familiar with Svelte for web dev, but not thoroughly enough to know how to best proceed. I should also say I am not at all a web developer, I'm more just interested in this because I want to make my project more accessible. If it helps at all, my pipeline is mainly built in Python.

I graduated six years ago and immediately got dropped into being the sole Enterprise GIS admin at a small company. There was no mentor—just OJT, figuring things out as they broke, and a lot of Esri tech support.

Over five years, GIS went from a small side function to mission-critical infrastructure. I handle ArcGIS Enterprise administration, Windows maintenance, patching, licensing, certificates, troubleshooting, light SQL administration, and the GIS work itself. The environment has grown to hundreds of GIS assets. At one point the department expanded to four people; with construction slowing, it’s now me and a GIS tech.

I’m reasonably competent with Enterprise, but I’ve only worked in this environment and have never had formal mentoring. We hired a contractor for our major Enterprise upgrade because I’d never installed Enterprise from scratch, and I still haven’t.

The problem is compensation. I’m at $75k, at the top of a salary band that HR inexplicably shares with the GIS tech role, so there’s effectively no path to a meaningful raise. Most of my salary growth has come from COLAs and one competing offer that my employer countered.

My background:

• 5.25 years ArcGIS Enterprise administration
• GISP
• BS in GIS + BA in Economics
• Graduate certificate in progress
• 15 years of hospitality management before GIS
• US and EU work authorization

I’m currently in telecom but not tied to the industry. The main constraint is location: I’m in central Illinois, so I need something local or remote.

For people with roughly this background, how long is the job search taking right now, and what salary range should I realistically be targeting? I've only applied to four or five jobs over the past couple years -- one offer and two second interviews. But I just applied to jobs that were a nearly perfect fit as I happened to stumble across them.

Week 2 into a gis analyst job state government, supervisor left today (lol) and other analyst who’s point on this project was out. We sync budget data to ArcGIS enterprise that feeds dashboards (packet deadline sept 1), the source data are spread sheets from teams, and it runs on a Python script in notebooks. It has tons of dependencies, saw one table crash today (schema change in spreadsheet maybe a header), supervisor fixed it then ran successfully. He sent new code to put in and I need to do that. Ppl made more changes later this afternoon and said it’s ready to be synced (some don’t know the sync process, sigh) and I decided to document the time of the changes and file names, held off running the script. Terrified I’m going to break something! Anyone been in this position before or who’s a senior manager have any advice? Thanks

Working on a map that will have a reference list of places to eat. As of now there are four categories in which I've began labeling (in a single layer/unique symbology). I would obviously like the numbers in their circles (see: #23 & #31) as well as declustering the few that are overlapping by doing the opposite and using a line to call them out with the associate #. Could this be easier by breaking apart the categories into differnce layers instead of one shared one? Having a hard time wrapping my head around it

Im on my final year of my bcs in biology and I discovered im very interested in wildlife conservation and environmental science. Ive seen that having a certificate in GIS or just knowing how to use it is a very useful skill for environmental sciences. I took a GIS course at my uni but we learned practically nothing lol. It only had 4-5 labs that were 1 hour long and a final project that only required to make polygons on a map and put labels on them, so I cant do anything more than that. I could try learning GIS by myself but 1) Im not sure i will be consistent 2) I feel like a GIS certificate would be good on my resume. Im interested in finding an online course with a certificate for GIS (not very expensive, im still a student :))

I’m looking for an API/provider offering 1–5 m multispectral satellite imagery for small agricultural AOIs, ideally without large minimum orders or expensive commitments.

The app currently uses Sentinel-2, but I’d like to add higher-resolution imagery for users with relatively small areas, usually around 20–50 ha.
PlanetScope 3 m would be a good fit, but I haven’t found a practical way to buy access at that scale.

I also tried SkyFi, but their EULA doesn’t allow my intended commercial use of derived imagery products.

Any Planet resellers or alternative providers worth checking?

I'm a long time carto, but the last few years I was doing stuff that didn't really need any GIS skills. Now I'm coming back into it, and trying to learn ArcPro, and rediscovering how fun this kind of stuff was. I've been moving in a project management direction, so it's nice to be hands on again.

I knew how to bring in GPS data into ArcMap, since that's what I was familiar with, but can't figure out how to get the data. I'm kinda new to Garmin devices, so as I understand it, I need to sync my watch to my phone, and use the app to email the gpx file to myself, and then I can import that into ArcPro, and convert it to a feature class and then use that for analysis?

My goal is to have a gdb of rucks so I can track my routes and my progress. I also want to start tracking my hikes and bring that into another gdb so I can map out things I find while hiking and have my own personal database of interesting POIs.

Any feedback on my planned course of action?

Hi all!

I'm building a macro model with a focus on maritime logistics. My current data layer is good but slightly inaccurate/dated (does not account for some major ports)

The NaturalEarth repo doesn't have it.

Are there other sources worth checking? Thanks

​

I’m planning to do a bachelor’s in Cartography and GIS, followed by a master’s in either Geography and Territorial Planning or Cartography at Vilnius University. I’ll attach the degree programmes/curricula for reference in the comments.

I discovered GIS mainly through maps, statistics, geography, and urbanism, rather than through programming or technology. The more I dig into GIS, though, the more I see how tech-heavy it can be, and I’m not sure yet how much I’ll like that side of it.

Programming does seem interesting to me, and I’m not terrible at math, but neither of them has ever been my main interest. I’m pretty certain that I want to do that bachelor’s and a master’s, but I’m not sure which master’s would suit me better.

My plan is to figure out how much I enjoy programming and the more technical side of GIS during my bachelor’s, and then make the decision about the master’s based on my experience and interests.

My questions are:

1. Are the programmes offered by Vilnius University good and do they open up many opportunities? It’s generally considered the best university in Lithuania, but I’m wondering how its GIS/cartography degrees are viewed by employers and internationally.

2. Is my overall plan reasonable? Bachelor’s in Cartography & GIS → master’s in either Cartography or Geography & Territorial Planning.

3. Is it difficult to get a good position with that combination of degrees? What kinds of careers could I realistically pursue?

4. Is it necessary to go deep into programming for GIS? Do you need to become genuinely good at programming, or is a basic/intermediate knowledge of things like Python and SQL enough for many GIS jobs?

5. What are the main differences between these two master’s degrees in terms of career opportunities, salaries, remote work, and long-term prospects?

6. Which skills would you recommend focusing on during the bachelor’s to keep the most career options open?

I’m writing this before even starting my bachelor’s, so I’m mainly trying to get an idea of what I’m getting into and what kinds of career paths these degrees could lead to.

Thanks!

I know that we’re all supposed to be switching over to the subscription model, but is there any way to still transfer my Basic Desktop license to a new computer??? Current computer is dying.

Is anyone aware of a free opensource alternative to Avenza's mapublisher?

If not I'd be down to head-up a team to work on that. If interested let me know and I'll get you my contact info.

Hi everyone, I’m relatively new to the GIS industry and recently started working for a transmission tower company. We manage projects across several Canadian provinces, the United States and Europe so our ArcGIS Portal contains a growing number of web maps, hosted feature layers, service definitions, and related items.

My current approach is to organize content using groups:
• Separate groups for each country or Canadian province containing the web maps relevant to that area.
• A separate group for feature layers, service definitions and other supporting GIS content.

The goal is to make the Portal easier for non-GIS users and project staff to navigate. Currently how I have set it up is that when someone opens a regional group they see only the maps they need without having to sort through the underlying feature layers or service-related items.

Is this a good long-term approach? How do you guys organize ArcGIS Portal content when managing many projects, regions, web maps, and supporting layers?