Archive - The Spatial Edge

🌐 Researchers tested 10 foundation models on SDG tracking. They flopped.

PLUS: Microsoft's climate model, mapping pollution from Flickr, and more.

Jul 9

🌐 Early stage crop-mapping just got a lot better

PLUS: zero-shot map labelling, building Youtube maps using text, and more.

Jul 3

June 2025

🌐 How to map hidden rural populations using existing data

PLUS: Why satellite forecasting models keep getting it wrong, further problems with foundation models, and more.

Jun 24 •

🌐 How reliable are Landsat and Sentinel vegetation estimates?

PLUS: the surprising limits of flood infrastructure, the hidden costs of droughts, and more.

Jun 18

🌐 Your area estimates might be off

PLUS: Monitoring road damage from mobile phones, increasing the resolution of SAR images, and more.

Jun 11

🌐 The shady business of academic citations

PLUS: planning flood evacuations using AR, generating terrain models using text, and more.

Jun 4

May 2025

🌐 What's really coming out of refineries?

PLUS: When AI models get it wrong in urban planning, detecting ships using radar, and more.

May 28

🌐 Some surprising insights about air pollution (involving blockchain)

PLUS: mapping walkability in Europe, the unpredictability of rivers, and more.

May 21

🌐 Turns out DHS surveys aren’t always accurate

PLUS: new job vacancy in my team, generating DEMs from optical images, and more.

May 14 •

🌐 We're losing rivers

PLUS: making radar images colourful, foundation models for estimating carbon stocks, and more.

May 7 •

April 2025

🌐 How exposed are we to toxic metal pollution?

PLUS: using geospatial data to select power plant locations, new open-source geospatial tools from Microsoft, and more.

Apr 30 •

🌐 Identifying the global economic elite

PLUS: Using fiber optic cables to measure seismic activity, a new tool from IBM to finetune geospatial foundation models and more.

Apr 21 •

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