Climate resilience, the geography of NYC taxis & photorealistic 3D maps

Welcome to Spatial Perspectives! Your monthly bite-sized newsletter for all things Spatial Data Science.

Photorealistic 3D Tiles in collaboration with Google Maps Platform & deck.gl

Ever look at Google Earth or Maps and just wish you could use those amazing 3D buildings and landscapes in your own maps? Well, now you can!

Thanks to the release of Google Maps Platform’s photorealistic tiles, you can now leverage 3D tiles to create more immersive visualizations to drive user engagement.?

As well as the 3D tiles, this announcement features a new TerrainExtension function which renders otherwise 2D data along a 3D surface. This allows you to “drape” your data over the 3D surface, “tying” your data to the landscape in a compelling way.?

Learn how you can implement this here, or check out The Importance of Vegetation for Cities story map to see this in action!

Careers in Spatial: advice from the experts

At 2023’s London Spatial Data Science Conference, our Geospatial Advocate Helen McKenzie quizzed a panel of experts on what it takes to build a successful career in spatial, and what organizations can be doing to attract and retain more talent. Here’s some of what they discussed:

?? Curiosity is one of the best qualities you can have. Always wanting to try something new or delve that bit deeper into your analysis will really help in your career.?

?? Organizations struggling with retention could consider ring-fencing time for their teams to engage in development, research or volunteering activities - it’s a win-win!

?? The panel also discussed - of course - ai! It’s predicted it could play a role in making it easier to apply for jobs - from crafting applications to creating job descriptions.?

Thanks to Jeremy Morley , Charlie Dacke FRGS CGeog & Adam Dennett for their insights!

Using Spatial Analytics for Climate Resilience in Hawai’i

Transport infrastructure is increasingly exposed to potential events like extreme weather, natural disasters, sea-level stresses & lava flows. At the same time, it remains a crucial component in the evacuation and recovery from these events.?

State of Hawaii, Department of Transportation 's (DoT) approach to tackling the effects of climate change on transport infrastructure & vulnerable communities, was to build the HDOT Climate Insights for Infrastructure app on Google Cloud #BigQuery.

This award-winning app allows users to understand the spatial relationship between transport infrastructure and hazards such as wildfire risk and coastal erosion (based on models built using Google Earth Engine (GEE) ). It also allows users to explore indices which highlight risk to different elements of society, such as critical infrastructure, vulnerable communities and ecological sensitivity.?

Find out more about how you can leverage spatial data & analytics to respond to the climate crisis here.

Map of the month

May's #Mapofthemonth award goes to this insightful app highlighting the geography of taxi activity in NYC.

This map shows the normalized difference between taxi pickups and dropoffs. When the value is green, there are far more pickups in relation to dropoffs, while the reverse is true in orange areas. Where it’s grey, there are roughly the same number of pickups and dropoffs, which is optimal for driver distribution.?

Explore the map here!?

If you want to have a go yourself, don’t forget you can sign up for a free two-week trial.

Coffee break content

Whether it be your morning, afternoon or evening coffee, here are some reads to accompany that caffeine boost:

• Interested in potential use cases for Generative AI in geospatial? Check out Javier de la Torre 's, Founder and CSO, Keynote talk at #SDSC23.
• Whether you’re opening a new restaurant or clothing boutique, check out how you can visualize trade areas with SafeGraph ’s Places dataset.
• User-defined parameters allow end users to filter and manipulate data in a controlled way - find out how you can use them in your work in our recent blog on self-service spatial analytics!
• Check out Simon Wrigley ’s investigation as to whether Cambridge (UK) is the North, using a H3 Spatial Index.
• After a longer read? You’ll love 100 Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You View the City by James Cheshire (Professor of Geographic Information & Cartography at 英国伦敦大学学院 , and Oliver Uberti , Co-Author & Designer)?

On the road!

To continue the marathon of geospatial events, here are the upcoming events and webinars you can find our team & wider community at:

• Come and explore the latest advances in Data, Sustainability & Artificial Intelligence in the #Geospatial space at the Google Cloud Summit, Madrid on June 1st.
• If you’re around Virginia, don’t miss the #OpenStreetMap community at State of the Map US 2023 June 8-11th for workshops, networking & talks.
• To celebrate data innovation & talk about best practice, see you at Big Data Analytics Summit Canada in Toronto June 13th & 14th.
• Join our team for the Open Data Science Conference Europe on June 14th & 15th to talk about the open source applications used in the Data Science community.
• Thought you’d miss out on all the fun on the 14th? Don’t worry as we have a Telco Data Monetization Webinar coming up with Snowflake , keep an eye out here for details.
• Catch The Data Appeal Company ’s webinar on Brand Sentiment Analysis on June 20th, registration soon to be released here.
• Incoming snowfall in the World of Data Collaboration at the Snowflake Summit in Las Vegas June 26th-29th! Don’t miss out on an exciting Après Ski event at Minus5IceBar on June 27th.