CUGOS 2025 Fall Fling

🎤️ Talk

OpenStreetMap in the hands of students: experiences from CWU

Sterling Quinn | Central Washington University

Dr. Sterling Quinn is an associate professor in the Geography Department at Central Washington University. He is interested in the politics of online maps and the human factors that surround FOSS development and adoption. He has published academic papers on the social influences behind crowdsourced projects like OpenStreetMap and Mapillary. Dr. Quinn's commentary has appeared in NPR Marketplace, Al Jazeera, and the Los Angeles Times, and he has been a regular speaker at FOSS4G.

The university classroom can be a place where people get their first introduction to OpenStreetMap (OSM) in an environment where they can receive guidance and feedback about their work. Academic and extracurricular activities with OSM provide students an opportunity to think critically about the crowdsourced data model and ways to add features that offer a high social value to the map. This presentation will share some ways that OSM has been incorporated into the Geography curriculum at Central Washington University (CWU). This includes training students on how to edit OSM, as well as involving students in research that uses, inventories, and builds OSM. We will also show how student coursework and events increased the richness of OSM data in under-mapped communities in the Pacific Northwest.

🎤️ Talk

Web maps, 2 ways with Streamlit and Pyscript

Christy Heaton | Woven by Toyota

Christy Heaton is a software engineer with over a decade of experience in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). As president of CUGOS (Cascadia Users of Geospatial Open Source), she champions the use of open-source tools for spatial analysis and advocates for Python in geospatial development.

Let’s use Python to make fun and interactive web maps! In this talk, we'll explore two easy ways to create web maps using Python: Streamlit and PyScript. We'll build a web app that helps you find the perfect hiking trail in Washington state, and in the process, learn how to integrate geographic data, visualize it interactively, and deploy it to the web.

🎤️ Talk

Why I made Sourdough: a new vector tile schema for OpenStreetMap

Jake Low | OpenStreetMap US

Jake Low is a software developer and mapmaker based in Seattle. He currently works at OpenStreetMap US, supporting MapRoulette, OSMCha, and other community tools. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking and mapping trails in OSM.

Vector tiles power the zoomable interactive maps seen in many websites and apps. Sourdough is a new vector tile schema designed to make the wealth of data in OpenStreetMap more easily accessible to map makers. In this talk, I will explain what Sourdough is, what its goals are and what tradeoffs it makes in pursuit of those goals, and show you how you can use Sourdough to create your own maps that leverage the broad variety of data available in OpenStreetMap.

🎤️ Talk

Workflows and tips for creating nice cartography with QGIS

Karsten Vennemann | Terra GIS

Karsten Vennemann is a GIS professional with a background in Geography and Soil Science. His work mostly focuses on GIS in the context of natural resources, sustainable development and social justice. In 2007 he started his own company, Terra GIS, based in Seattle. He teaches classes in Open Source GIS and a good portion of his consulting work involves creating and supporting Open Source based Web GIS solutions.

For the last 3 years, I have been working on my personal cartography project: a poster-size map featuring an adventurous 3,000 km bicycle trip from the town of Copacabana at Lake Titicaca, Bolivia to the city of Mendoza in northern Argentina with my son in 2022. The cartography project often stalled due to time constraints over the 3 years, but finally I am ready to cross the finish line with a finished poster-size map measuring 36 by 54 inches, printed at a scale of 1:750,000.

I will feature the map and take you on a journey showing how the map was created, which data was used and how it was processed, touching on a variety of tools in QGIS and sharing what I learned while demonstrating the techniques and workflows used for specific cartographic styles, advanced workflows, and innovative approaches to create the poster. The techniques developed for this personal project can be generalized into broader cartographic approaches that I will explain, making them applicable to other mapping projects and demonstrating how personal cartographic challenges can lead to generally useful workflows and design approaches.

🎤️ Talk

Using LLMs to enhance your FOSS geodata workflow

Hal Mueller

Hal Mueller fell into the FOSS4G world in grad school when he used an early version of GRASS to generate habitat datasets for predator/prey modeling. He keeps one foot in the FOSS4G data world and one foot in the Apple ecosystem, incorporating geodata into applications for iPhone, Vision Pro, and web.

Modern LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude can be effective partners as you assemble and analyze open source geodata, but you need to keep them on a short leash and maintain an understanding of the problem you're trying to solve. We will review case studies you can apply to your work today. You will learn how to use LLMs to construct scripts for data download, webscraping, and data cleanup; to update an obsolete codebase; and to understand the legacy code you just inherited and add features and automated tests. We will look at some LLM blind alleys and explore how to recover from them. Code examples are in Python, C++, Mapserver, and Swift.

🎤️ Talk

Mapping the Invisible Grid: Powering Renewable Energy Development with Open Source GIS

Kristen Narcisi | MicroGrid Networks

Kristen Narcisi is Head of Data at MicroGrid Networks, a renewable-energy developer and operator focused on advancing battery storage and grid modernization in New York City. Her work bridges data science, GIS, and infrastructure planning, with a focus on using open-source tools to digitize and understand the electric grid. With a background in biomedical informatics, Kristen specializes in transforming fragmented data into actionable insight, supporting both renewable energy development and community engagement around clean energy projects.

Often described as the largest machine in the world, the electric grid touches nearly every part of modern life, yet much of it remains invisible. Data on electric infrastructure, parcel information, environmental factors, and regulatory compliance is scattered across city, state, and utility agencies, often buried in PDFs or spreadsheets and rarely standardized. This fragmentation slows renewable energy progress and reflects a broader challenge: we live in a dynamic world, but our data remains static and siloed. Access to critical datasets is also narrowing, and much of this information is at risk of disappearing.

Through the lens of distribution-level renewable energy development in New York City, this talk explores the applications of open-source geospatial tools in bringing structure and context to these complex, disconnected systems. Drawing from work on MicroGrid Networks’ proprietary mapping platform, it shows how efforts to digitize the grid help align utilities, developers, and communities toward the common goal of advancing the renewable-energy transition to make a more resilient grid.

🎤️ Talk

Electrifying Transportation with eRoadMAP

Matt Stevenson | CORE GIS

Matt Stevenson is Principal at CORE GIS, where he specializes in cartography, spatial analysis, remote sensing, conservation planning, and web mapping. He works primarily with nonprofits and government agencies focused on conservation, natural resources, and public policy.

eRoadMAP is an interactive webmap designed to estimate the power and energy needs for electrifying transportation in the USA at the local level, covering light–, medium–, and heavy–duty vehicles. eRoadMAP helps users identify areas where multiple customers cluster around one or two feeders, fostering proactive discussions between utilities and customers for effective infrastructure planning. Users can view both Energy and Power requirements for near-term electrification needs at multiple scales, animate the time series of projections, include or exclude long-haul trucks, filter the number of MWh/Day, and show a variety of reference layers including load capacity, charging stations, truck stops, and demographic characteristics. We used H3 hexagons, Mapbox, Postgis, pg_tileserv, and GitHub to create the map, and will explain how we built it and share lessons learned over multiple phases of design, development, testing and deployment.

🎤️ Talk

Reviewing coupled GPS and accelerometry data with R-Shiny and FOSS

Phil Hurvitz | GeoScience Research Labs, LLC

Phil Hurvitz is a geographic information scientist with over 3 decades of experience working in GIS. He is currently employed by the WA Office of Financial Management as a Senior Data Scientist in Forecasting and Research Systems (not doing GIS work!). Phil is also principal of GeoScience Resarch Labs, LLC, working on projects integrating spatially explicit data with health outcomes. He holds degrees from Seattle University (BA) and the University of Washington (master of forest resources, PhD in urban design and planning).

In a project testing different physical therapy interventions applied to children with cerebral palsy, we simultaneously collected global positioning system (GPS) and StepWatch accelerometry step count data. The resultant data included 8,033,460 accelerometry records and 6,969,902 GPS records. Data were integrated into a PostGIS database, with data joined by common time stamp. The research team needed a way to review data to determine which data, if any, to censor from the final analytic data set based on unusual locations. We created an app using R-Shiny and Leaflet to display the GPS and accelerometry data on a basemap, allowing the research team to review data interactively on a day-by-day basis. This provided an easy to use and efficient interface for reviewing a large data set. The presentation will include a description of methodology and a live demonstration of the application.

🎤️ Talk

Virtual Plot Alignment for Forest Monitoring

Rachel Deininger | UW FLAME Lab

Rachel Deininger is a LiDAR analyst in the Fire, Landscape, and Adaptive Management Lab at the University of Washington. Her work focuses on using terrestrial LiDAR to study forests.

Forest monitoring relies on accurately locating preestablished plots, but permanent markers are often prohibited or unreliable. LiDAR technology offers a virtual alternative, enabling precise plot navigation without monumentation. A mobile application can leverage LiDAR scans to help operators align virtual plots with real-world features for improved inventory accuracy, enabling field operators to locate plot centers using LiDAR-derived virtual plots. The application will support scan annotation, offline viewing, and augmented reality-based navigation. Field testing will assess accuracy and usability to refine the tool for operational deployment. A prototype iPad app was developed with three core functions: downloading LiDAR scans, annotating scans offline, and projecting scans in augmented reality. Accuracy and usability were evaluated with field testing in real-world conditions. A LiDAR-based iPad application enables accurate virtual plot relocation, eliminating the need for permanent markers. Field testing will assess precision and ease of use, providing a proof of concept for integrating LiDAR into forest inventory and monitoring workflows.

🎤️ Talk

Model-Based Geostatistics

Nat Henry | Henry Spatial Analysis

Dr. Nat Henry is a professional geographer and the Director of Henry Spatial Analysis. His public health and urban mobility work has been featured in Nature, The Lancet, Bloomberg CityLab, and on the front pages of The New York Times and The Seattle Times.

Model-based geostatistics can be a powerful framework for understanding spatial data, but the difficulty of setting up these models has inhibited their widespread use. This talk introduces model-based geostatistics using the open-source mbg package in R. Using examples from public health and transportation planning, we will explore different approaches to spatial regression, link our outcomes to underlying spatial predictors, and highlight the importance of model validation in the age of AI.

🎤️ Talk

Identifying environmental drivers of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus abundance in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex using Random Forest modeling

Nathanial O'Dell | UW Department of Epidemiology

Nathanial O'Dell is a second year Epidemiology MPH student in the UW School of Public Health. His work revolves around using spatiotemporal data to describe trends in vector ecology, specifically as it pertains to Aedes aegypti in the United States.

Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus are 2 medically important vectors that have established populations globally. In the United States, Ae. aegypti populations declined post-Ae. albopictus introduction, though both species now can be readily found throughout the Southern US. Despite overlapping distributions, there are few studies that investigate and compare the drivers of abundance at spatial scales relevant to mosquito control and surveillance districts. To address this limitation, we analyzed longitudinal mosquito surveillance data from the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, Texas. We trained a Random Forest model on a subset of Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus data and meteorological and sociodemographic variables from Tarrant and Dallas counties to predict the abundance of both species within the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. Additionally, we interpolated predictions to map mosquito abundance at unsampled locations.

This presentation will explore the structure and wrangling of real mosquito trapping data and the methods used in order to extract environmental and socioeconomic variables to spatial grids in R and their application to mosquito distribution modelling efforts, with special emphasis placed on the implications of spatial analysis for public health policy.

🎤️ Talk

Estimating Structurally Complex Forests in Western Washington with Remote Sensing

Ethan Spahn | WA State Department of Natural Resources

Ethan Spahn works as the WA State Forest Biometrician for the WA State Department of Natural Resources. His background is in remote sensing algorithm development.