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

GERS, Metadata, and Maps Built for Machines

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,

The Evolution of Positioning Systems

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

Sentinel Bird

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 proje

Fields Of The World

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 Professo

Virtual Worlds for Physical AI Systems

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. Ap

GPS, But 100 Times Stronger

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 mov

Turning Aerial Imagery Into a Searchable World

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, capturi

Cloud Native for the Rest of Us

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 c

Mapping With 360 Cameras

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 fo

Who Pays for Open Source?

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 QFiel

The Great Retooling

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

Earth Observation - The Invisible Industry

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, f

10 Tools for Telling Stories With Maps

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 FEM

Agents, Guardrails, and the Death of the Dashboard

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 intersec

How HOT Is Rethinking Drone Mapping

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 Rebec

Common Space

This episode examines the Common Space initiative, a non-profit project dedicated to building and launching high-resolution optical satellites designed specifically for h

AI in QGIS

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 in

Geospatial Makers Start Building!

Geospatial Product Swiss Army Knife 1. The "Build It and They Won't Come" Trap We have all seen it: a talented geospatial professional spends months—perhaps years—perfect

Vibe Coding and the Fragmentation of Open Source

Why Machine-Writing Code is the Best (and Most Dangerous) Thing for Geospatial:   The current discourse surrounding AI coding is nothing if not polarized. On one side, t

A5 Pentagons Are the New Bestagons

How can you accurately aggregate and compare point-based data from different parts of the world? When analyzing crime rates, population, or environmental factors, how do