Ignacio Borlaf-Mena

Cover figure from this papger of a ship surveying to the ellipsoid. https://www.fig.net/resources/publications/figpub/pub62/Figpub62.pdf

Ellipsoidally referenced surveys... what NOAA does. That was my response to a question on the MB-System mailing list for info about ellipsoidally referenced surveys.

listserver.mbari.org/sympa/arc/mb...

nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/learn/ellips...

New R package: rgeomorphon 📦 by Andrew Brown

Classifies terrain forms using a parallel C++ implementation of the geomorphon algorithm.

🔗 github.com/brownag/rgeo...

#RStats #GIS #TerrainAnalysis #RemoteSensing #RSpatial

Clear examples of the degraded forecasts we face in this piece from @michaelrlowry.bsky.social

Here's Iona from yesterday, with a clear shot of its internal structure in the current state on top, and a useless green blob in the suggested replacement on bottom.

I last posted here about 6 months ago. Here's what I've been working on and/or thinking about. #rstats, #statistics, #ml

package upkeep: we are doing major preventive maintenance on the tidymodels packages ("upkeep week!"). It's rote but very rewarding work. Error messages are 100x better.

1/3

Blog post about lossless float image compression (EXR, HTJ2K, JPEG-XL, mesh optimizer): aras-p.info/blog/2025/07...

R, Python, and Calculus: Are They on the Same Page?

@amstatnews.bsky.social @tandfresearch.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

GenAI has polluted image search results, especially for animal pics. It’s now basically impossible to find accurate art references.

Enter this: a repository of open-access, AI-free images of wild & exotic taxa. Artists creating *without AI* have blanket permission for derivative/transformative use.

Geometric and Topological Checks and Corrections in QGIS Credits: Pixabay (Pixabay Content License) The Importance of Compliance A geographic data layer must comply with many rules and constraints. For example: Geometric Topological Arbitrary rule...

📢 Exciting news for QGIS users! 🚀 Starting with version 3.44, new geometric and topological checks and corrections are available. Create automated validation chains with 21 verification and 10 correction processes! #QGIS #GIS #Geospatial

GitHub - sujit016/A-Gentle-Introduction-to-Statistical-Computing-Using-Julia: This repository provides a beginner-friendly introduction to statistical computing using the Julia programming language. I... This repository provides a beginner-friendly introduction to statistical computing using the Julia programming language. It covers key statistical concepts, simulations, and implementations, an ess...

Getting started with statistical computing in Julia? This beginner-friendly guide covers core concepts, #simulations, and practical applications in AI/ML. A great resource for students, researchers & data practitioners. Check it out! github.com/sujit016/A-G... #JuliaLang #MachineLearning #AI #ML

Lecture slides for my "Introduction to #ComputerVision" and "#DeepLearning in Computer Vision" courses.

🆕 Gaussian Splatting
🆕 Flow Matching

The included videos do not contain voiceovers yet, planned for a future revision.

I've got another draft #STAC tutorial up, talking about using #GDAL 's STACIT driver to work with and download data from STAC APIs.

Highly appreciate any feedback folks have!
mikemahoney218.github.io/stac-sprint-...

Thanks to Mike Sumner for showing me how to do this!

Reviewer notes: So you’re interested in “lagged effects.” In some fields, researchers who end up with time series of two variables of interest (X and Y) like to analyze (reciprocal) lagged effects between them. Does X affect Y at a later point in time, and d...

New blog post! Let's say you've measured two variables repeatedly and want to investigate how one affects the other over time. Here are some recommendations for how to do that well.

www.the100.ci/2025/06/25/r...

Decode GeoTIFF to GPU memory Sharing this blog post on speeding up Cloud-optimized GeoTIFF (COG) reads using a CUDA GPU library called nvTIFF that I’ve been playing around with for the past month. Hopefully it’ll be useful for fo...

do you "struggle to use GDAL effectively"?

discourse.pangeo.io/t/decode-geo...

huge effort with Zarr/kerchunk/Rust/GPU to do everything but just use a C++ library as it was designed 😆

(this blog post is cool - just a weird easter egg in that discourse post makes me 🤔 - tell me stories!)

OpenLandMap-soildb: global soil information at 30 m spatial resolution for 2000–2022+ based on spatiotemporal Machine Learning and harmonized legacy soil samples and observations Abstract. There is increasing interest in global dynamic soil information with changes in soil properties mapped over time and at high spatial resolution. Thanks to long-term, multi-temporal, and fine...

The v1 of the 30 m resolution global soil carbon density, SOC content, pH, texture fractions, bulk density and soil types (USDA subgroups) now out; soil carbon and soil pH are mapped as dynamic soil variables for 5yr intervals. Preprint: doi.org/10.5194/essd...
Data: github.com/openlandmap/...

This image features part of Bolivia. This vibrant image was created using the radar instrument’s different polarisation channels, with each colour revealing distinct characteristics of the landscape. For instance, green hues mainly represent rainforest, red hues forested floodplains and wetlands, and blue–purple is indicative of grasslands, while black areas are rivers and lakes. The image spans approximately 90 km along the Biomass satellite's flight path (length) and 60 km across in width, with north oriented to the right.

🆕 The first stunning images from our groundbreaking #Biomass satellite mission have been released – they mark a major leap forward in our ability to understand how Earth’s forests are changing and exactly how they contribute to the global carbon cycle 🌳🌍

www.esa.int/Applications...

Digital elevation model of the Grand River, South Dakota, USA. River floodplain in blue (high) to white (low), the rest of the landscape in orange (high) to green (low). The river meanders, the landscape on both sides of the floodplain is eroded with finger-like gullies.

A nice river, somewhere, meandering through a bit of glacial deposits and cutting into Upper Cretaceous shale and sandstone.
High-resolution prints are for sale on request (special edition!).

Picture of the Austria Center Vienna with Living Planet Symposium 2025 banners.

Humboldt EOLab at #LPS25 in Vienna!
We are looking forward to lots of interesting presentations and posters from @hostertp.bsky.social, @ggohar.bsky.social , @kelewinska.bsky.social and many more.
Have a look at the full list of EOLab contributions: eolab.geographie.hu-berlin.de/uploads/EOLa....

Satellite Embedding V1  |  Earth Engine Data Catalog  |  Google for Developers The Google Satellite Embedding dataset is a global, analysis-ready collection of learned geospatial embeddings. Each 10-meter pixel in this dataset is a 64-dimensional representation, or "embeddi...

Say goodbye to human-readable EO images. Computers do not need to look and think as humans to get work done. Accuracy and efficiency is all you need. Google EE team now makes 10m ARD (annual starting from 2020) synthetic bands / deep features (64 in total): developers.google.com/earth-engine...

LPS 2025

Excited to present at #LPS25! 🛰️

I’ll share how Phenological Feature Spaces help map vegetation fractions in semiarid rangelands.

🔗 Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Make sure to check @humboldteolab.bsky.social at #LPS25 eolab.geographie.hu-berlin.de

#EOchat #LPS25

Lo que eleva verdaderamente la versión en japonés es que Patrisio está cantando este pepinaco de Miki Matsubara:

📣Attending @esa.int's #LPS25 next week?
Make sure to catch the 𝐂.𝟎𝟓.𝟎𝟒 session (𝐓𝐮𝐞 𝟐𝟒𝐭𝐡 | 𝟏𝟔:𝟏𝟓-𝟏𝟕:𝟒𝟓 | 𝐇𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐋𝟏/𝐋𝟐), during which I will talk about 🌍 global 🛰️ #Landsat and #Sentinel-2 data availability and how it shapes feasibility of long-term analyses.
See you in Vienna!

Every grid ever has a transform, the index at offset 0 with scale 1. "Geospatial" just takes that one step further for non 0,1 cases while Zarr (as adopted from Matlab and NetCDF) can only use inflated arrays of coordinates.

🚀 Exciting news! The #GeoAI Python package now lets you train land cover classification models with just one line of code.

Leverage any PyTorch segmentation model from smp.readthedocs.io — with hundreds of image encoders & pretrained weights available.

NEW PAPER 📣 Tree species proportion prediction using #AirborneLaserScanning & #Sentinel2 data with a #DeepLearning approach

#OpenAccess🔓 doi.org/10.1080/0143...
📖: @ijremotesensing.bsky.social

✍️ Murray (@brntmrry.bsky.social), Coops, White, Dick (@adamdick.bsky.social‬) & Ragab

@forestry.ubc.ca

ICYMI githistory.xyz is a great way to navigate #git commits and visualise how a file has been changing across commits

Just replace github.com with github.githistory.xyz in the URL and enjoy! #rstats

There Were Still Old People When Life Expectancy Was 35. A demography myth that won't die

Great read from @drjenndowd.bsky.social on the claim that “Historically, no one lived past age 35.”, and the importance of child mortality and means..."Every time someone states this “fact,” a demographer loses a piece of their soul."

jenndowd.substack.com/p/there-were...

Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature’s research papers From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science.

From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science

https://go.nature.com/4kIRR01

Jury Theorems for Peer Review Marcus Arvan, Liam Kofi Bright, and Remco Heesen Abstract: Peer review is often taken to be the main form of quality control on academic research. Usually journals carry this out. However, parts of maths and physics appear to have a parallel, crowd-sourced model of peer review, where articles are posted on the arXiv to be publicly discussed. In this article we argue that crowd-sourced peer review is likely to do better than journal-solicited peer review at sorting articles by quality. Our argument rests on two key claims. First, crowd-sourced peer review will lead on average to more reviewers per article than journal-solicited peer review. Second, due to the wisdom of the crowds, more reviewers will tend to make better judgements than fewer reviewers will. We make the second claim precise by looking at the Condorcet jury theorem as well as two related jury theorems developed specifically to apply to peer review.

Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.

Several recent studies suggest the summer solstice might act as a universal cue for key plant processes.
But why would the longest day of the year be so important? Our new study in @pnas.org sheds some light on this question ⏬
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
@lizzieinvancouver.bsky.social

An extremely detailed diagram of the history of Science Fiction. The diagram has a rather monstrous aspect, with tentacle-like roots and branches. On the upper left corner are found the roots of the diagram: Fear and Wonder, giving way to Animism and Legend. Other portals into the diagram are Philosophy, Art, Exploration and Observation. These roots converge and possibly interact with other concepts such as the Enlightment, Science, Utopias, Romantic Movements. Important science fiction works, authors and genres emerge on the way, amidst a vast quantity of other entries: the Gothic Novel, Frankestein, Jules Vernes, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, Science Adventure, Fantasy Adventure, Alice in Wonderland, Weird Tales, Pulp Magazines, Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Magazine, H.P. Lovecraft, Sword+Sorcery, Modern Horrror, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Dune, Space Opera, Cyber Punk, Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, 2001 Space Odissey, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Total Recall, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dracula, Metropolis, King Kong, Aldous Huxley, and so on. A timeline is indicated on the upper and lower boundaries of the diagram.

The History of Science Fiction diagram, by Ward Shelley

🔍 this diagram is insanely detailed, so make sure to check out its high resolution version at commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Th... 📚🪐💙