Spatial Stack with Matt Forrest

What does it actually take to make AI useful on location data? In this episode, Matt Forrest sits down with Ryan Urabe, co-founder and CTO of Dataplor, to unpack how AI, embeddings, and agents are changing the way we work with points of interest and places data. Ryan explains why general-purpose models already understand spatial concepts but still struggle to execute them, and why the real unlock...

What does it actually take to map every agricultural field on Earth? In this episode, Matt sits down with Jen Marcus, Vice President of Strategic Innovation Programs at Taylor Geospatial, and Isaac Corley, Director of AI/ML Research at Taylor Geospatial and a torchgeo maintainer, the team behind Fields of The World (FTW). In late April they released the first globally consistent dataset of agricul...

In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Troy Schmidt, a 20-year GIS developer and the creator of SPHERE, an open-source Python package that runs FEMA's HAZUS flood risk methodology on GeoParquet and DuckDB. Troy dives into why depth damage functions are simpler than the engineering language suggests, and how the gap between the HAZUS methodology and the HAZUS software pushed him...

In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Maggie Ma, tech content creator at @maggieindata and former geospatial data scientist. Maggie left her corporate data science role last year to become a full-time content creator across Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok. She's a 3x LinkedIn Learning instructor and an AI educator helping people break into data science, learn coding, a...

What happens when you give an AI the ability to see and understand the physical world? In this episode, Matt Forrest sits down with Yael Maguire, GM and VP of Google Maps Platform and Google Earth, to unpack the massive platform shift happening at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and geospatial technology. Yael pulls back the curtain on how Google is transforming its massive corpus of 2...

The future is spatial, but how do we actually make sense of the data? In this episode, we sit down with Emily Lisle from Dataplor to discuss the current state of location intelligence and how to overcome the biggest location intelligence challenges facing businesses today. We dive into the data foundation, exploring the massive complexities of scaling geospatial data, consumer data, and POI data o...

A viral LinkedIn post called "Something Big Is Happening" by Matt Schumer has been making the rounds and for good reason. In this episode, I break down why the pace of AI development should have every GIS professional paying attention, what I'm seeing in the geospatial space right now (from Claude Code in ArcGIS to AI-specific job postings), and the four things you should be doing right now to fut...

If you are still trying to run your entire geospatial workflow on a local desktop, you are fighting a losing battle. The "Modern GIS Stack" looks chaotic at first glance with dozens of logos, cloud formats, and new databases. But once you strip away the noise, there are actually only a few key layers you need to master to make it all work. 🚀 Don't navigate this shift alone. Join the Spatial Lab:...

Have you ever stopped to think about how GPS completely changed the world simply by becoming an invisible infrastructure running in the background of our everyday apps? According to Pierrick Poulenas, the CEO and co-founder of Picterra, the exact same pattern is playing out right now with Earth Observation and GeoAI.In this episode, we sit down with Pierrick to explore how GeoAI is bridging the ga...

In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Kyle Walker, Professor of Geography at TCU and the creator of popular R packages like tigris and tidycensus. Kyle dives into why he views US Census data as critical infrastructure and how open data is fundamentally transforming decision-making across industries like real estate and energy. He shares the origin story of his open-source work,...

We have never had more data about our planet: petabytes of satellite imagery, aerial photos, and sensor readings collected daily. Yet, turning that massive volume of "noise" into a clear signal remains the fundamental challenge of the geospatial industry. In this episode of the Spatial Stack, I sit down with the engineering and product minds from Wherobots: Ryan, Phil, and Len - to tear down the a...

There are trillions of dollars invested in the physical world every da: infrastructure, supply chains, and our planet. Yet many of these massive decisions are made without the data to back them up. For too long, geospatial analytics has been gated behind specialized teams and siloed technology, treated as "spatial is special" rather than just another data type. In this episode, we sit down with Da...

Large Language Models can write poetry and debug code, but they still don't understand the fundamental physics of the real world. Ask an AI to find the "nearest restaurant" to a specific coordinate, and it struggles because it lacks Spatial Intelligence. In this episode, we sit down with Jia Yu, the co-creator of Apache Sedona and co-founder of Wherobots, to discuss why geospatial data breaks stan...

In 1963, the US Postal Service introduced "Mr. Zip" to make mail delivery faster. They never intended for those five digits to determine your insurance premiums, your home value, or your health outcomes. In this short deep-dive, we explore how an arbitrary logistical tool became a shorthand for community and why that’s dangerous. From the misleading boundaries of Dallas, Texas, to the tragic data...

Maps have been around for thousands of years, but what they represent and how they work is changing faster than ever. In this episode, I’m joined by Cliff Allison, who has spent more than 30 years building enterprise-scale mapping systems for governments and global organizations. Today, he leads government global sales at TomTom, helping bring modern, AI-powered mapping infrastructure to some of t...

We have an incredible amount of public geospatial data—high-resolution elevation, weather forecasts, floodplain maps, real-time sensors—yet most people still can’t easily answer a simple question: “What’s my flood risk right here, right now?” In this episode, I’m joined by Kevin Bullock, an aerospace engineer and remote sensing expert at Development Seed, to talk about how he turned years of geosp...

If there’s one word to describe the past year in geospatial, it’s change. In this solo episode, I take you behind the scenes of what I’ve been seeing, hearing, and working on across geospatial, cloud, and AI over the past year, and how those shifts are shaping what actually matters heading into 2026 . I talk about: - Where AI is real vs overhyped in geospatial workflows - Why cloud-native geospati...

GeoPandas is one of the most important tools in modern GIS, but many people still aren’t sure when to use it, why it matters, or where it fits alongside tools like PostGIS, DuckDB, Apache Sedona, and cloud-native data formats. In this video, I break down GeoPandas from the ground up: what it is, how it works under the hood, its strengths and limitations, and when to choose something else. If you’v...

Meta has more than 3 billion users across Instagram, WhatsApp, and even its new AR glasses. Behind the scenes, all of them are powered by one thing: maps. But instead of relying on closed systems, Meta is betting big on open data—and building its own global map. In this episode, I talk with Said Turksever from Meta, who leads their open mapping strategy. We dive into: 🌍 Why Meta cares so much abo...

ArcGIS Pro has been the center of GIS workflows for decades but how does it hold up in a world moving toward open, cloud-native, and AI-powered geospatial tools? In this video, I break down what ArcGIS Pro actually is, where it shines, where it struggles, and how it fits into the modern GIS ecosystem. Whether you’re doing personal GIS projects, running a small team, or architecting enterprise-scal...

In this episode, I sit down with Felix Palmer, creator of A5, a new global grid system that’s redefining how we represent and analyze the Earth. Felix shares how a 1980s math paper led him to build a pentagon-based global grid, one that fixes the distortions found in systems like H3 and S2, achieving true equal-area cells across the entire planet. We discuss the geometry behind A5, the trade-offs...

What does it really take to teach AI to understand our planet? In this episode, Matt sits down with Isaac Corley, Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Wherobots and maintainer of TorchGeo, and Christopher Ren, Data Scientist and writer behind some of the most thought-provoking essays on Earth observation and AI. They dive deep into the state of Geospatial AI from embeddings and foundation models to...

AI can answer almost anything, except “where.” That gap is huge, and  Kieran McCann from Mapbox is working to close it. In this episode of The Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Kieran, who’s spent six years helping Mapbox quietly power some of the most widely used maps and location services in the world. From his early days doing grunt map edits at Apple Maps to shaping Mapbox’s next big bet: AI-...

GeoAI isn’t just another buzzword, it’s a turning point for the entire geospatial industry. In this episode of The Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Tee Barr, Director at Verisk and Councilor for the American Geographical Society, to unpack why GeoAI could reshape the field as profoundly as GPS once did. From climate risk and supply chain resilience to defense, finance, and human security, Tee ex...

What happens when a geospatial professional decides to map the entire business of our industry? In this episode of Spatial Stack, Matt talks with Wilfred Waters, the creator of the first-ever Geospatial Index, a hand-built list tracking hundreds of public companies shaping maps, data, satellites, sensors, and spatial software. Will shares how he spent countless late nights pulling together every g...