Author: Pia Zaruba
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Climate Action Navigator Launch
The Climate Action Navigator is a new dashboard by HeiGIT that displays high-resolution spatial indicators related to climate action. The dashboard can help communities, organizations, and decision-makers identify local strengths and highlight areas for improvement. Join the launch event to learn how it can be used to develop locally tailored solutions for more sustainable cities…
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Post-doctoral Research Visit at African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Cape Town
From January to March 2025, Dr. Steffen Knoblauch undertook a post-doctoral research visit at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Cape Town, South Africa. His research focused on integrating Earth Observation data with bioacoustics, building on his PhD work in spatiotemporal mosquito monitoring for diseases such as Dengue. The primary focus of his…
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New Paper: “Paved or unpaved? A Deep Learning derived Road Surface Global Dataset from Mapillary Street-View Imagery”
The paper addresses the global shortage of detailed road surface data by leveraging street-view imagery from Mapillary and advanced deep learning techniques. Traditional datasets like OpenStreetMap (OSM) often lack comprehensive road surface attributes—with only about 30–40% coverage—hindering applications such as travel time estimation, disaster response routing, urban planning, and environmental assessments. To fill this gap,…
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Harnessing UAV Technology to Support Municipal Solid Waste Management
The full article was originally published on geoawesome. The management of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) represents a significant challenge, particularly in regions lacking adequate waste management infrastructure. In Africa, several regions are identified as critical hotspots for waste mismanagement. In 2012, only 55% of MSW was collected across Africa, with a mere 4% being recycled,…
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First release of ohsome-planet: OSM history data in GeoParquet format
We’re excited to share the release of the ohsome-planet – a new software library on GitHub, marking a significant step toward the development of ohsome 2.0. This tool is designed to facilitate the transformation of raw OpenStreetMap (OSM) history data into the GeoParquet format, making it more accessible and efficient for spatial data analysis. What…
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New Paper “An explainable GeoAI approach for the multimodal analysis of urban human dynamics: a case study for the COVID-19 pandemic in Rio de Janeiro”
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of understanding human behavior in cities to develop effective public health interventions. Crowd-sourced geospatial data available online can therefore serve as a valuable resource for analyzing such dynamics with Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI). However, previous research often struggles with the complexity and heterogeneity of such data, and faces challenges…
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Unleashing the Power of GIS, Together: The IFRC Network GIS Training Platform
This article was originally published on the website of 510, the data and digital unit of The Netherlands Red Cross: Unleashing the Power of GIS, Together: The IFRC Network GIS Training Platform – 510 The Red Cross Red Crescent Movement has long channelled innovation to enhance humanitarian efforts. A shining example of this is the…
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openrouteservice: key statistics and insights for 2024
HeiGIT has released the 2024 key statistics and numbers of openrouteservice. It demonstrates a significant increase in new users compared to the previous year. Specifically, there has been an increase of approximately 39% in new users since 2023, with a particularly notable rise in collaborative users. The number has increased by around 270%, compared to…
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Silver Ways: Enhancing Walkability for Older Adults in 15-Minute Cities
The 15-minute city concept is gaining traction in urban planning, aiming to ensure that essential services are within a short walk or bike ride. As the older population grows, walking remains a key factor in their well-being, yet their mobility is highly dependent on the built environment. A new research project, Silver Ways, is tackling…