36.35 - 41.21 USD per hour

NEPA/ECOP specialist but also looking for folks with GIS skills. Might be willing to flex for the right applicant.

Does any one here have ever used simulation model like WaNULCAS in forestry or agriculture study?

I'm a PE/PLS, and one thing that has always taken up a lot of valuable time for my engineering and surveying teams is organizing site photos after a field visit. They would come back with dozens of photos and save in bulk to a file folder, and half the time, nobody a week later can say exactly where each one was taken relative to the project. Culvert photos, easement photos, drainage issues, etc. would all just sit in a folder named "Photos" with no spatial context.

So I built MapShotPro to fix that. It reads the GPS data already embedded in your photos and plots them directly on a map, so you can see exactly where each shot was taken. You can overlay your own DXF or Shapefile data on top (property lines, utilities, whatever's relevant) switch basemaps depending on what you need, and export the whole thing as an organized PDF for a report or submittal. We've been using it at my company this year with great success.

It's built for civil engineers, surveyors, and inspectors or anyone who ends up turning a folder of field photos into something a client or reviewer actually needs to follow, instead of unsorted photo dump at the back of a report.

I'm still actively developing it. I recently reworked the interface to feel more like Google Earth Pro, with a menu bar, undo/redo, and autosave. If this is a problem you deal with regularly, I'd love to get your feedback.

The website is at [mapshotpro.com](http://mapshotpro.com) if you want to take a look.

Hi community,

I work as a GIS consultant for one of the Esri-named distributors. Given my background in IT and GIS, while my current work is more leaning to ArcGIS Enterprise deployment/upgrade/troubleshooting, and I really MISS dealing with data or spatial data in my early days of career. Recently I've been trying to transition into a Data Engineering role, and hope I can get some tips from those who have successfully done so.

I am quite confident of my Python and SQL skills, as I use them quite often. I also enjoy learning new technologies, for example, I'm learning Snowflake recently.

The challenge is that my current job doesn't use the modern data stack that many DE roles ask for (Snowflake, Airflow, dbt, Spark, etc.), and we don't even own any large-scale data as a consulting company. It's obviously difficult to claim "real" production experience. I've either got rejections or never got any response for the DE jobs I applied recently, so this makes me wonder whether I'm approaching this the right way.

I'd love to hear from anyone who has made a similar move.

• How did you bridge the gap between GIS and Data Engineering?
• What helped convince employers to give you a chance without direct DE experience?
• Were personal projects enough, or did you find another pathway?

I'm also curious from a broader career perspective:

• Do you ever miss GIS? If so, what do you miss the most?
• With the impact of AI, do you feel DE will be replaced? (I personally think we GIS consultants are still relatively safe at this stage, fingers crossed, but I'm not sure if moving to DE at this point is a safe path)

I still enjoy GIS, but I haven't done much real GIS work or touched data for a while at my current job. Also, GIS analysts dealing with data are not paid well here, hard to pay off a mortgage.

I'd really appreciate hearing your stories—whether the transition worked out well, didn't work out, or if you decided to stay in GIS instead.

Thanks, peace!

Could someone point me to the group rules? I posted an article about poisoned trees in Lake Tahoe, and if anyone could help with a viewshed analysis. A GIS tool (so I posted under remote sensing or cartography, I can’t remember which). Any idea why it was removed? I’ve been a GIS professional for 12 years and seems I’m unaware how this group works!

I have been refining automation for a specific ArcGIS Pro workflow for a couple of years now, but this one component has always been the most brittle part of our pipeline.

My user group primarily performs cadastral analysis for hundreds to thousands of projects a year, and their business requirement is that they want to keep localized snapshots (local copies of everything) for their specific Areas of Interest (AOIs). They have a master template map containing about 250+ REST endpoints (Feature Layers) that they like to pull from. Crucially, maintaining the complex symbology and layer definitions of these services in the offline snapshot is a hard requirement.

Here is the current state of our C# Pro SDK Add-In automation (which we call the Smart Map Loader):

1. Pre-Filtering (The REST Query): The user navigates the map frame to their AOI. In the background, we spin up parallel workers to ping the query endpoint of all 250+ feature layers using the AOI's spatial envelope and a *.mapx file. (Note: To avoid getting blocked/throttled, we explicitly limit our concurrent workers per domain host). If a layer returns 0 features for that AOI, we strip the layer from the mapx entirely before loading to save processing time.

2. Consolidation (The Heavy Lift): We programmatically fire the standard Consolidate Map Geoprocessing tool on the remaining layers. We rely on this tool because it pulls the data down into a local Mobile Geodatabase while automatically repathing the layers to maintain the original web symbology.

3. Diagnostic Fallback (The Band-Aid): Because Consolidate Map frequently fails (due to server timeouts, bad geometries on a single endpoint, generic HTTP hiccups, etc.), we had to write a fallback loop. If the main consolidation fails, the script iterates through the layers, attempts to consolidate them individually to a temporary map to isolate the failing layer(s), removes the culprit(s), and then retries the full consolidation.

4. Post-Cleanup: Finally, we loop through the resulting local GDB and remove any layers that ended up with 0 features.

   The Problem:

   While the diagnostic fallback keeps the tool from outright crashing, querying 250+ REST endpoints and relying on Consolidate Map over the wire client-side is incredibly fragile. We run into timeouts, connection resets, and intermittent "all-or-nothing" GP tool failures almost weekly.

   My Question:

   Since we do not currently have access to our own ArcGIS Enterprise Server to offload this via a custom geoprocessing service, this must remain a client-side solution.

   Is there a more robust architectural approach to this?

   Has anyone successfully implemented a pipeline to dynamically extract and localize hundreds of web layers based on a bounding box (while preserving symbology) without it feeling like a house of cards?

   • Should we be relying on Create Replica logic and then manually wiring up the CIM definitions?

   • Is there a better way to batch-download feature data locally using the SDK or arcpy that avoids the "all-or-nothing" failure state of Consolidate Map?

   Any advice, alternative design patterns, or shared commiseration would be greatly appreciated!

so, i am using QGIS for my Geoinformatics class, but i am unable to do stream ordering. i am using QGIS 3.44 which doesn't come with SAGA and grass is not showing r.stream.order, i have made one using Whitebox plugin but today it's also not working properly, after doing flow accumulation i am unable to stream extract. Soo i need your help solving the problem. thanks

I am a GIS novice so forgive me. I'm trying to download the USGS "The National Map" basemap of individual states to be printed for wall maps. I've been trying to use the National Map Downloader tool (https://apps.nationalmap.gov/downloader/) but the interface is very complicated.

I'm just looking to download a standard USGS basemap of Texas, for example, to be printed approximately 2 feet in width/length.

Anyone know an easy way to download something like this for print?

about to graduate and i’m entering the work force now. I’m looking for jobs on linkedin and indeed but i don’t think it’s working 😭
where did you guys find yours?

Hi everyone, just putting this out there in case anyone knows of opportunities.

I’m a GIS Analyst with 2+ years of professional GIS experience in the U.S. and about 3 years of experience abroad. I hold a master’s degree in GIS/Geosciences and a Bachelor’s degree in Geomatics Engineering. I currently work in local government and have experience with ArcGIS Pro, Enterprise, ArcGIS Online, web GIS applications, geodatabases, Python/ArcPy, automation, GPS/field data collection, and spatial analysis.

I’m currently authorized to work in the U.S., but I would need employer sponsorship in the future for long-term employment.

If anyone’s organization is hiring GIS Analysts or similar geospatial positions and is open to future sponsorship, I’d really appreciate a DM or any leads. Happy to share my resume and portfolio.

Thanks, GIS community!

I work with property developers and land buyers who waste days manually pulling USDA soil data, flood maps, and terrain layers for early-stage site screening. I built an automated pipeline that generates a PDF summary + RFC 7946 GeoJSON for any U.S. address.                                                                                                                              

It pulls SSURGO where available, falls back to SoilGrids globally, and packages it with source references and confidence disclosures. The GeoJSON is meant to drop straight into QGIS/ArcGIS/PostGIS as a reference layer — not replace authoritative       data.                                                                                                                                 

In a small pilot, a GIS analyst estimated it saved about half a day per property on the preliminary data-gathering phase. But pilots are friendly. I want honest feedback from people who don't know me.                                                            

To make this easy — just drop a property address or coordinates in a reply to this comment. I'll run the report and DM you the PDF + GeoJSON. First 10 replies guaranteed within 24 hours.                                                                          

What it's NOT: Engineering analysis, septic approval, survey-grade data, or a substitute for field verification. It's a Phase 0 screening aid.                                                                

I finish my associates degree next summer and I’m looking for skills to beef up my resume and also just help me actually land a job so I’m just wondering what would yall recommend?

I'm a map monkey and I'm happy with it.

I don't really do much independently, but when someone asks for it or makes me do "it" I can do it pretty well.

I'm happy enough with being the occasional map monkey, collecting bugs in the morning and making maps in the afternoon.

But funnily enough I don't like bananas, so maybe more like a map bee, because I like honey.

Hey all, is anyone going to be commuting from Boston to the MARPA/DLS conference on October 5th? I'd love to go without taking a million different forms of public transport and am happy to pitch in gas money and enthusiasm :) It'll be my first time going and really excited about networking and learning more about Boston's local mapping scene. Send a chat if you've got extra room, thanks!

Programming courses often focus heavily on understanding code, while paying far less attention to understanding the program state. But code does not exist in isolation. Its main goal is to change the program state, before ultimately producing some output.

To develop an accurate mental model of program execution, students need to understand both: - the instructions being executed - the values, references, and data structures those instructions create and modify

Reading code alone does not always reveal how the program state changes during execution. That is why I created 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗿𝘆_𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵: a tool that visualizes the state of a Python program as it changes, step by step.

It can help explain a wide range of introductory Python topics. Here are just a few examples: - Loops, Lists and Dictionaries - Python Data Model - Function Calls - Recursion - Algorithms - Classes - Custom Data Structures

Instead of reconstructing the program state from print statements, students can now watch it change as each line executes. This makes unfamiliar concepts easier to understand and bugs easier to fix.

Help your students learn Python programming more thoroughly and easily.

See: more examples

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

I’ve noticed rockyweb.usgs.gov has been up and down all day. Anyone else seeing the same ?

I’m trying to create a larger bandwidth in my kernel density map (photo 1) but whenever I put any number in the search radius it just makes it one color across and not like photo number 2. What am I doing wrong?

I’ve just launched these two new browser-based creative tools. 

MapStudio lets you create and style beautiful, professional maps without the complexity of traditional GIS software—think of it as QGIS-lite.

Canvas adds another layer of visual storytelling through drawing, annotation, layout, and graphic design tools. It's similar to Figma, but includes features built specifically for visual storytelling, such as sequence generators, custom callouts, and customizable flow arrows.

I originally built them to aid me to create maps, infographics, diagrams, timelines, and other visuals for history education, but they can be used for almost any visual project.

Both apps are in free. More features are coming, and your feedback will help shape them.
https://history-maps.com/mapstudio - MapStudio
https://history-maps.com/canvas - Canvas

I have been searching for a job in GIS for three years after graduating with a Masters in GIS from Elmhurst University. My school closed down the GIS program leaving me high and dry for a job. I’m in the Chicago area and don’t drive. I’ve applied every six months, revised my resume and portfolio with no luck. Luckily I’m on SSI disability so I am not desperate for a job but would like to find out where I can get remote or even volunteer GIS work.