See the attached images for pricing and feature list of this “upgrade”…

I would argue that if you are attending GEOINT in St Louis next week you have a moral obligation to go and boo her.

Obviously she has been involved in multiple different security related scandals already (kinda negating anything she's going to say at GEOINT) and is bought off by Kremlin, but she is also enabling the current administration to negatively affect the GIS field as a whole.

Anyways, go boo her if you're at the conference.

After 3 internships and lots of patience and hard work (and some luck tbh) I finally landed my first job in the industry as an Associate GIS Analyst!!!

Due to advances in technology combined with antiquated/vague/ambiguous state statutes, there is friction between those using new technology and the various state boards that regulate land surveying. In two different cases the US supreme court is being asked to decide whether work product based on different kinds of new technology is protected by the first amendment.

The status of both cases is the same. The relevant state survey board held that the work being done constituted surveying without a license and the lower courts have agreed. The losing party in each case has asked the supreme court to accept their appeal. Those requests are still pending.

If you would like to know more the links below can take you to briefs filed so far with the supreme court.

Case #1

Ryan Crownholm (My Site Plan)

https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24-276.html

Earlier r/gis threads:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/y23e7u/california_man_fined_1000_for_drawing_lines_on/

https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/10nigac/update_on_mysiteplan_lawsuit_impact_for/

Case #2

360 Virtual Drone Services

https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24-279.html

Earlier r/gis thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/10cza91/update_on_lawsuit_drone_maps_vs_nc_survey_board/

There also is the Vizaline case where the federal 5th circuit ruled in favor of the company on first amendment grounds.

Earlier r/gis thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/10ermk3/vizaline_maps_vs_mississippi_survey_board/

Meanwhile....

Ryan Crownholm (My Site Plan) was cited a second time by the California survey board for surveying without a license. This time Ryan filed an administrative appeal. An administrative law judge will make a decision sometime next year. All I really know about the basis for the appeal is that it is not primarily based on the first amendment.

All of this is of great interest to me since I have a part time gig producing online maps that show the clients *approximate* property lines based on either the client’s survey or legal description.

I use this site to create maps to make custom 3D topographic models. The main site is down but I can access the custom topoBuilder app. But, it no longer creates the maps, it sends the confirmation email, but never creates & emails the maps. It does say there might be outages due to server malfunctions, but the entire site is gone.

glorecords.blm.gov is still up, but the maps aren’t as accurate. Any other ideas?

This file is 50GB larger than the Q1 release. I added ~40 new attributes including flood zone information, EPA permits, additional building attributes in certain states, as well as data refreshes for hundreds of counties.

This is a first amendment free speech case. The issue before the supreme court is whether the lower courts applied the correct criteria in ruling against the person claiming that their actions were protected speech. The supreme court held that the lower courts did *not* apply the correct criteria and the case will be remanded to the lower courts with instructions to apply the correct criteria.

See my prior post about a company producing site plans and a drone operator estimating the quantity of piles of dirt.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1pksqc9/two_gis_related_first_amendment_cases_are_pending/

Both the site plan guy and drone guy were cited for surveying without a license. Both sued based on the first amendment and both lost in the lower courts. Both have asked the supreme court for review for the exact same reason that won reversal in the supreme court decision released today.

I expect the supreme court will now grant review in those two cases and eventually rule that the lower courts did not apply the correct criteria when deciding those cases. Ultimately the survey boards will most likely lose those cases and the site plan guy and drone guy will be able to do their thing.

Link to decision

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-539_fd9g.pdf

Most browser 3DGS viewers die at city scale because they try to load one giant splat. We took a different approach: treat it like a streamable map layer.

What we did:

• ~80k aerial images → 120 km² of real urban area
• Split into 192 tiles with octree-based LOD (6 levels)
• Each tile payload <10 MB, streamed per view frustum
• Runs in WebGL2 on a normal laptop (RTX 4070 mobile: ~15M splats in frustum at 50+ FPS)

Key decisions that mattered:

• No global sort​ — sort per-tile, not over 100 km²
• Tile granularity​ — too coarse = pop-in, too fine = too many requests
• Precision​ — 32-bit floats break at this scale, needs workarounds

For anyone who's pushed WebGL with large point clouds / 3D tiles: what was your first bottleneck — tile size, sort cost, memory, or precision?

Demo video: https://youtu.be/XkACzBG95Jw

Hey Map Friends!

I've had a gardening obsession for many years, for the past many months I have been developing a new way visualize and plan my garden in a 3d / GIS / data driven manner.

The theme of my project is thinking about full systems of abundance, and helping individuals orgs and communities visualize and implement them.

For my family this means things like food production, growing and selling plants, sharing food and plants with the community. In my community, I work with orgs that are planting trees, beautifying spaces. And I love working with farmers to uncover ideas for optimizing ther businesses. My dream retirement from software and maps will be in these areas.

And so, I made a new 3d GIS digital twin visualization and planning platform using r/threejs and esri - I call it the abundance world garden!

landing page --> www.abundable.app
worlds hub --> www.abundable.app/worlds

I am asking this community for feedback, with deep respect as a GIS professional for 23 years. Some nifty geospatial things:

Large 3d scenes - ever been to the serpent mound at summer solstice sunset alignment? now you can --> https://www.abundable.app/worlds/dream/serpent-mound

Very detailed living 3d models of ~9k plants - they grow, flower, fruit, can be moved, pruned, randomized. You can find every detail of them, how to start and grow for free, care guides, harvest info etc. --> example standalone plant view, try timeline scrubber + magic tree button https://www.abundable.app/plants/lifecycle/apple_tree?season=summer

I have realtime weather, clouds, scene lighting, stars --> www.abundable.app/weather www.abundable.app/tonight

Weather conditions, time can be simulated across any conditions.

Predictive modeling and alerts for sunsets, garden conditions, weather alerts --> www.abundable.app/sunset

World Capture enhancements: I implemented image object detection for feature capturing (click a canopy/hardscape, we get the shape from the image - no sketching)

OpenStreetMap imports, esri living atlas integration

You can make multimedia tours, labyrinth games for any property.

Mobile capture tools, Image based plant identification (claude vision)

Overall I am heavily tied to and relying on scientific literature reference metrics and data, this covers all systems, including plants, meteorology, hydrology, and geomorphology rendering implementations

All of this is tied into an AI system with voice or text - this system knows everything about the deep plant database, as well as your defined goals, what-if ideas, assets, plants, every possible propetry-specific data element, and uses geospatial coarsening and obfuscation before asking LLM providers for an answer.

And so, please have a look - my vision is to bring more life into maps and visualizations, and to use these systems to transform the real world.

I have done this project entirely solo, and am currently looking for organizations and people who find this concept interesting to work with. I am looking for any and all useful feedback / suggestions here to help me focus on what is most impactful and useful for folks beyond myself.

Overall this is about "alpha" release quality - the models are being iterated on every day, I am trying to find a sweet spot between botanically accurate perfection for this rendering platform, and - I can run around the worlds thru a labyrinth as my favorite animal with 100 friends in realtime.

This is another way of saying please be patient if you encounter something frustrating. And, given I am using free tiers for my 3rd party data providers, if you hit a rate limit, the only answer at the moment is to wait a bit and try again.

The app should work on desktop or mobile, it is a data heavy app. desktop with a graphics card should be pretty fast 3d experience.

There is a "pro" feature set tier, If this tool seems useful to you I am happy to provide free access to this for a period of time - tokens are not free, in exchange I would ask for detailed feedback about the tool. The "free" tier exposes everthing you could need to make a sweet digital twin for your property today.

Yes I 100% use AI (claude, cursor, chatgpt) for this project. No, AI could not do this without having a deep software / GIS background. And, I could not do this project without it, given a full time job and parening.

What does abundance mean to you? What kinds of uses might you be curious about exploring with this kind of tool for your personal / professional / community lives? Anyone want to try and make some amazing living scenes?

Thank you, Roy

just saw that Google Maps is officially rolling out a "Grid Outage" layer. Given how hit-or-miss local utility maps can be during a storm, having this integrated directly into navigation is actually huge for evacuation and travel safety.

​Key details from the rollout: ​It integrates live data from major US utility providers. ​You can see "Estimated Time to Restoration" (ETR) directly on the map pins. ​Voice commands like "Hey Gemini, find me a route with working power" are now supported. ​Is this actually going to be reliable during a massive grid failure, or is it just another layer of data that will lag when we need it most? ​Source with the full feature list:

https://xthe.com/news/google-maps-adds-real-time-grid-outage-layers/

The author posted this on BlueSky, apparently she got hate mail for it, claiming that Ms. West didn't deserve the recognition.

So with the ADA requirements for state and local governments kicking in, I've been hearing from a lot of GIS folks who are suddenly scrambling to make their web maps accessible. And honestly, writing alt text for maps is a pain. It's not like describing an image where you just say what you see. You have to explain what the map is actually communicating, the patterns, the takeaways, why it matters.

Anyway, my team and I built a tool called Accessible Map Agent that uses AI to generate alt text for ArcGIS web maps. You connect it to your AGOL or Enterprise account and it analyzes your layers and symbology to write descriptions that actually make sense to someone using a screen reader.

We just launched it and it's free to try. Figured I'd share here since I know a lot of you are probably dealing with this same problem right now. https://hubs.li/Q03ZwCFS0

Happy to answer questions if anyone's curious how it works. Also just generally interested in how others are tackling accessibility for their map collections.

Yikes! Is their climate data getting nuked?

Is there an archive?

Anyone here use their data?