Overthinking GIS (2024)
23 comments
·July 6, 2025OtherShrezzing
7952
You still have to send people out into the field. And you had to know what you waned to survey ahead of time. During the war that sometimes meant sending survey teams behind enemy lines. Satellite remote sensing changed all of that.
fghorow
If you will permit me one cautionary point, given that the deadly Texas flash floods just happened.
The geomorphic reason that there is flat land next to a river is because it is the flood plane. That kind of land looks tempting, but can be deadly. Obviously, GIS analysis could add some kind of distance metric from a river to a usability score, but the analyst needs to know about the problem first.
Just a bit of "ground truthing" from a professional geoscientist.
docsuser3
Here in Germany we have open maps like the following that were created by the government to inform of potential flood areas: https://umweltatlas.bayern.de/mapapps/resources/apps/umwelta...
Everyone that buys a house or land knows these maps and checks them since the last deadly flood happened a few years ago. I cannot believe that the US decided to defund the offices that help to gather these kind of information.
ImaCake
Those flood maps are common across the first world, sometimes called a "flood overlay" and there is usually also a "bushfire overlay" if you live in Australia. They help describe risk, in the insurance sense, and are presumably used for both insurance and risk management.
reedciccio
Any architect and urban planner is aware of the problems with flatlands near river beds. It's the politicians who decide to ignore the science, known since the times of the Romans.
eru
Yes. Government subsidized insurance bears much of the blame.
fghorow
s/flood plane/floodplain/
(Sorry for the typo.)
cyanydeez
unfortunately, the thing that needs to be overcome is government regulations and compliance.
The past 30 years have yielded tons of new hazard maps, but communities refuse to implement them in any meaningful way because of capitalism.
So it really doesnt matter how good our analysis and predictive powers are if the policies are never enforced.
tjwebbnorfolk
Government-subsidized insurance is the opposite of capitalism.
If the market were allowed to operate, no one would be able to afford these houses on the coast. And in many cases that would be a good thing. Instead, the politicians have decided that beachfront property is some kind of fundamental right that we should all collectively pay for.
nativeit
I think you are sadly correct. Collectivization of beach house insurance, but not health insurance, seems like a rather apt microcosm of contemporary America.
Bloating
... wait, I thought it was because Trump, or Bush, or Reagan or some other political scapegoat
oreilles
The USGS provides exactly what the author was looking for, free of charges, no computation required, no download required:
https://elevation.nationalmap.gov/arcgis/services/3DEPElevat...
Preview in QGIS: https://ibb.co/B5T49YBj
jvanderbot
Yeah the moment you reach for pixel level processing tricks in GIS you need to pause and rtfm.
Grade calculations are right in qgis docs and part of their lessons, and are also top Google hits.
https://docs.qgis.org/3.40/en/docs/training_manual/rasters/t...
Even better, you'll learn about DEMs vs topo maps.
selimnairb
For more advanced terrain analysis, see GRASS GIS (https://grass.osgeo.org/). It’s a but clunky, but accessible from QGIS via a plugin. Whitebox also has some nice terrain analysis tools (https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/).
rthnbgrredf
GIS is truly impressive from a user's perspective: intuitive, powerful, and full possibilities. However, from a sysadmin's point of view, hosting an ArcGIS Enterprise setup - the market leader in this space - can quickly turn into a complex and frustrating experience.
icameron
Truth. It’s a pure lock in, so many agencies are committed and sunk so much cost and effort into it that they’re never seriously going to consider any other vendor/solution. The ESRI documentation for any advanced topics falls apart quickly. I’ve spent days with their support liaisons, walking through the steps they have documented and getting different results.
jt_b
Fortunately there are a lot of great alternatives to the ESRI lock-in, and FOSS has a long and rich tradition in Geo.
mikeiavelli
I only skimmed it, but I want to point out to the author that in his slope equation, the slope is denoted by m, not x.
But yes, using the Laplacian seems natural as a metric for what he wants to measure. Coming from a physics background though, it felt weird being explained in terms of pixels in a picture what a laplacian is...
Havoc
Found a nice list of GIS datasets here that seems mostly under nice licenses
vintagedave
Neat. Great to see old-school _actual analysis_, I was worried when I read 'LLM' in the text. Instead, I learned something -- the Laplace operator. The OP's explanation is considerably easier to understand than Wikipedia's :)
>GIS is probably one of the best things to happen to cartography in the last couple hundred years.
GIS is amazing, but the first and second world wars saw a lot of advances in cartography. I'd say #1 advancement goes to the near-perfecting of portable Theodolites. It's a telescope which allows you to look at one point, then look at another, and very accurately understand the angles between them. From that, with a little walking and Pythagoras, you can figure out distances, and thereby create accurate maps with relatively minimal effort and human-error opportunities.
I say "relatively minimal effort" because technique the portable theodolite replaced was sending battalions of civil servants out into the countryside with 50ft long chains and asking them to walk the length, height and breadth of the country.