Learning Paths
Curated, topic-based routes through the guides — start at the top of a path and work down.
A path and a topic answer different questions. A topic page is everything the site has on a subject, listed so you can find the one guide you came for. A path is an order: the same guides arranged so each one assumes only what the ones before it covered.
Each path opens with a cornerstone guide that runs the whole workflow end to end, then goes deeper one part at a time — the concept first where a concept is load-bearing, then the task, then the errors that task produces. Most run to a dozen or so guides, which is a few evenings rather than a course.
You do not have to start at the top. If you already know what a CRS is, skip that stage; the paths are ordered rather than gated. And a guide can appear in several paths, because the same technique is a step on more than one route.
-
Finding & Fetching Data
Get the data before you analyse it — from OSM, web services and satellite catalogues. -
Spatial Statistics
Measure the pattern instead of eyeballing the map. -
Terrain & Elevation
Turn a grid of heights into slope, shade, contours and drainage. -
Networks & Routing
Distance along the street, not across the rooftops. -
Raster Analysis
Read, reproject, clip and summarise raster data in Python. -
Spatial SQL & PostGIS
Move the heavy lifting from Python into the database. -
Making Maps
Turn a GeoDataFrame into a map someone else can read. -
GIS Data Cleaning
Turn messy spatial data into analysis-ready datasets. -
Batch Processing
Process many files at once, reliably. -
Automation & Pipelines
Build repeatable, config-driven GIS pipelines. -
QGIS Automation
Automate QGIS with PyQGIS and Processing models. -
Satellite Imagery
From a scene on a catalogue to a number you can defend. -
LiDAR & Point Clouds
Millions of points, and the surfaces worth deriving from them. -
Cloud-Native GIS
Read the part you need, not the file it lives in. -
Publishing Web Maps
Get the data into a browser without shipping the whole dataset. -
Movement & Time
Tracks are not points — the order and the clock are the data. -
Spatial Machine Learning
Why the usual rules break, and what to do instead. -
Interpolation & Surfaces
A continuous surface from scattered samples, with its support attached. -
Geocoding & Addresses
Address text is data too — and it is the messiest data in the file. -
Cartography & Map Design
The map is correct. Now make it readable. -
DuckDB for Spatial Data
A spatial database with no server, reading the file you already have. -
Serving Spatial Data
The dataset is finished. Now other people need it over HTTP. -
Maps, Apps & Dashboards
Let the reader ask their own question — within a budget. -
Gridded & Climate Data
A raster with a time axis, a calendar and forty years in one file. -
H3 & Global Grids
Give every point a cell id and half the geometry work becomes a join. -
Census & Demographics
The most-used open data there is, and the easiest to map wrongly. -
Location & Accessibility
Who can reach what — and where the next site should go. -
Hydrology & Watersheds
A DEM already knows where the water goes. Ask it carefully. -
Geoprivacy & Anonymisation
A coordinate is an identifier. Release it as if it were one. -
Metadata, Licensing & Provenance
A layer nobody can describe, cite or re-run is a layer nobody should use. -
3D & Buildings
A footprint plus a height is not a building, but it is most of one. -
Coastal & Marine
The shoreline is a choice of datum, not a line on a map. -
Agriculture & Crops
One field, one season, and a dozen ways to measure it wrong. -
Public Transit & GTFS
A timetable is a graph that changes every minute. -
Radar & SAR Imagery
It sees through cloud, and none of the numbers mean what they look like. -
Biodiversity & Species Data
A map of occurrence records is a map of where people looked. -
Linear Referencing
The road is one-dimensional, and its data is numbered accordingly. -
Natural Hazards & Risk
A hazard map is not a risk map, and the difference is arithmetic. -
Air Quality Data
Every air quality number is a pollutant, a unit, a period and a place — and the place is the hard part. -
Renewable Energy Siting
The resource picks the country; the grid and the ground pick the field. -
Urban Morphology
Every measure of a city is a measure of its footprints, its land unit and its boundary. -
Forest Monitoring
A forest number is a threshold, a release, a pixel area and a period before it is a forest. -
Urban Heat Mapping
A heat map is a surface, a moment and a reference — and none of them is the air people breathe at night.