Brian Mc Donald

Native Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF support in Lonboard! - Stream massive COGs on demand - Full control over image rendering: apply colormaps, change band combinations, use ML models - Read COGs from anywhere, including local files and private data (via Obstore) developmentseed.org/lonboard/lat...

🚨 South Sudan: Hundreds of thousands of people and our teams have received an evacuation order in Akobo, ahead of an imminent government forces offensive on the opposition-held town.

I just released a simple tool for converting ECHO Single Form XML documents to Word or Markdown. Try out the library here pypi.org/project/esf-... and the fully client-side app here esf-convert.brianmcdonald.me

“In 2025 Americans would collectively spend more on their Halloween candy than their government did on life-saving humanitarian aid.” From Sam Vigersky at the @cfr.org: www.cfr.org/expert-brief...

byoe (bring your own editor) for @marimo.io is here. built from scratch with LSP + uv marimo.io/blog/vscode

Released Lonboard v0.13! - New layer types: H3, S2, Geohash, A5 and fixed HeatmapLayer - Render data layers beneath Maplibre text labels - Map UI controls: scale, fullscreen, navigation - Significant performance improvements: fixing earlier regressions developmentseed.org/lonboard/lat...

cool news from PySAL world: the (imminent) next release of the `esda` module will have (1) spatial correlograms and (2) (more importantly) @levijohnwolf.bsky.social's partial Moran's I estimator described in www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1... (both already in main if you can't wait 😎)

Want to know how many internally displaced people there are at a national or subnational level, their cause of displacement and their areas of origin? I have been very proud to lead the DTM team's work over the past months in launching V3 of their API. There's more to come dtm-apim-portal.iom.int

Uncontrolled fire in dense displacement setting such as camps are a large but sadly under researched area. I worked with our IOM CCCM team earlier this year on development of the Fire Risk Index, a framework to better understand , quantify, and respond to these risks. reliefweb.int/report/niger...

In beautiful South Sudan this week. Listening. Learning.

We’re chuffed to announce the 0.2 release of the GeoArrow specification! We released the first version in September, 2023 and have since worked with the community towards our vision that getting spatial data from one library to another should be fast, easy, and preserve properties like the CRS.

UN Global Pulse have launched a call for proposals for the next Cohort of their accelerator programme. www.unglobalpulse.org/2025-call-fo... Read about some of work on the DTM API as part of cohort 2 medium.com/un-global-pu...

A new report by the DTM team providing an overview of major migratory routes in 2024. dtm.iom.int/products/the...

This visual story of Global Migration derived Facebook data is very well done www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

New report from @iom.int's DTM on displacement and returnees in Syria. Report: dtm.iom.int/reports/syri... The dataset is on the DTM website and HDX and the DTM API is also updated.

A project I've been working on for the last 6 months. I feel really strongly about making geospatial technology and data available and understood by as many people as possible. And that requires getting creative with the ways we share information. This is my small contribution to that effort.

NEW: Maps showing estimated building damage from LA fires and latest fire perimeters and evacuation areas, huge thanks to Jamon Van Den Hoek and Corey Scher for the data. Read @grimeslikedimes.bsky.social's account www.ft.com/content/9400...

The Global Climate Highlights 2024 report is now online. Delve in the analysis and access all the charts, information, and data on temperature, sea ice, precipitation, and greenhouse gas concentrations. Explore the data that defined 2024: https://bit.ly/40kQpcz #C3S #GCH2024

Not lost on me that it's nonprofit tech, app.watchduty.org, showing up & actually working in the midst of the LA fires (donate to them!) Meanwhile platforms fail to surface key news, vital info is paywalled... As I've been saying, we need a new tech paradigm, yesterday!

Today marks exactly 20 years since the 2004 magnitude 9.1 great Sumatra earthquake and tsunami, one of the worst disasters of all time. It was the planet's first M9 quake in over 40 years. More than 225,000 lost their lives across 14 different nations, an unprecedented transnational disaster.

Amazing images of Syrians going back home

OSMnx 2.0.0 has been released! 🎉 This has been a massive effort over the past year to streamline the package's API, re-think its internal organization, and optimize its code. Today OSMnx is faster, more memory efficient, and fully type-annotated for a better user experience. 🧵

Heartfelt gratitude and kudos to @developmentseed.org for making #satsummit Lisbon happen. Really enjoyed both the content and gathering of people. It´s all about a community working together in the end. ❤️

We are excited to announce reactable-py: interactive tables in #Python! 🐍 This tool is a port of the R package reactable. It offers quick options for sorting, searching, and paginating data, working with pandas and polars, and customization. Check it out today! machow.github.io/reactable-py...

Quarto 1.6 is out! 🎉 Download it here: quarto.org/docs/download/ Quarto 1.6 supports unified branding across formats, updates to RevealJS, a new shortcode to reorder content, a landscape page block, and more. Blog post: quarto.org/docs/blog/po...