Spatial Stack with Matt Forrest

In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Dr. Chris Tucker, chairman of the American Geographical Society, in the year the AGS turns 175. Chris makes the case that spatial thinking is foundational literacy, on the level of language or math, and that the 4.5 million people who have taken AP Human Geography are already practicing it every day in jobs that never mention geography. He...

What does it take to map something you have never seen? In this episode, Matt Forrest sits down with Justin Stewart, quantitative ecologist at SPUN, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, to unpack how his team built the first global map of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, the soil organisms living in symbiosis with most plants on Earth. Justin walks through the full pipeline, from r...

What does it actually take for an AI to navigate you through the real world, without a screen and without a camera running the whole time? In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt Forrest sits down with Sean Gorman and Pramukta Rao, the co-founders of Zephr, to unpack how they ground large language models in location. Sean and Pramukta spent twenty years building startups together, from GeoIQ to...

In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down solo to work through a fight that broke out across Reddit and LinkedIn last week: is GIS dying, or is it just changing its name? It started with a GIS manager who argued the field is alive, pointing to a friend who landed a $200,000 job building autonomous systems, a role where GIS never appeared in the title or the description. The comments pus...

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...