Geospatial FM

Abdulfatai Sanusi is a geospatial developer at Proforce Galaxies. He tells us the story of an MS Azure to Esri Enterprise migration at a power utility that covers several states in Nigeria. He then moves on to the next phase of his career at Proforce. They are an earth observation satellite design and data pipeline company. He described being a member of a talented team that also develops software. For example they have their own mobile data collection app and we discussed how this could actually be used in a utility context as part of the System of Monitoring.

Overall it was a very eye opening discussion and showed us that the geospatial industry is alive an well in Nigeria! I was inspired, and went fishing in the Nigerian Stock Exchange for geospatial stocks to add to the GEO500.

I found 3:

1. Julius Berger
2. Caverton Offshore
3. MTN Nigeria

So it was a fruitful exercise on all fronts, thank you Abdulfatai and please remember me for the Proforce IPO!

Ryan Kmetz is back to talk with us about https://quantagri.substack.com/. This initiative began in January 2026. It is about analyzing satellite data to predict the monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) reports. Ryan proposes a novel approach and shares some eye raising stats about lead times and profitability. This episode is inspiration for how we are all equipped to process the world using free data and AI. What can you do with your geospatial basic training?

Links to items discussed:

1. SatYield https://www.satyield.com/

2. Sentinel

   1. ESA https://sentinels.copernicus.eu/web/sentinel/copernicus/sentinel-2

   2. Google Earth Engine https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/COPERNICUS_S2_SR_HARMONIZED#description

3. Landsat

   1. NASA https://science.nasa.gov/mission/landsat/

   2. Google Earth Engine https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/landsat

4. Taylor Geospatial Engine field boundaries

   1. Background https://taylorgeospatial.org/agricultural-field-boundaries-mapped-globally-for-the-first-time/

   2. Web app https://fieldsofthe.world/

5. Field boundaries from Planet https://docs.planet.com/data/planetary-variables/field-boundaries/

6. ‘As the world turns’ Blackrock geospatial podcast https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/podcasts/the-bid/geospatial-data

7. Novi https://www.geospatial.fm/p/novi-and-a-new-venture-geospatial
   

This was quite the episode! We return for Round 2 with Nelson Roque. He is Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State. He walked us through OpenClaw.

Nelson is an incredibly useful guest because he is able to cover both podcasts I have run - The Behavioral Investor and this one, Geospatial FM. A significant message from The Behavioral Investor was the effect of delay discounting or hyperbolic discounting. This is the decay in appeal of even fantastic outcomes when there is a significant delay until they happen. A formula is available here and here. Applying the formula shows that receiving a billion dollars in 3 generations, 108 years from now, only feels like $10,000 right now. The feeling decays with delay.

There are a couple of ways to defeat hyperbolic discounting. One is episodic future thinking. This is a way to juice the dopamine reward system by a multimodal, multisensory imagining of what one might see, hear, smell, think, touch and feel upon achieving a financial goal. Turns out that, of course, AI has been applied to help here. Another that I came up with is instant, constant feedback about the reduction in amount of money one can pass to the next generation with each spending decision you make. What do I mean?

Let's work with the $600 you might splurge on a smartwatch. The US market has compounded at 7% annually, adjusted for inflation and including dividends, the past 150 years. Imagine you are 42 and have a life expectancy of 72. You've therefore got 30 years of compounding $600 at 7% annually. This becomes $4,500 if you invest it in a low cost US market index fund with a 0.05% fee.

So, you could enjoy the $600 watch or consider that in splurging on it you are effectively saying to your child you don't want to give them $4,500 when you die. So what I'm proposing is an app to make the effect of long time periods on investing outcomes visible.

Please watch the episode as Nelson walks through producing this live with an AGI agent orchestrator called OpenClaw. He also profiles some geospatial situation monitoring apps (e.g. here). These were inspired by the incredible Bilawal Sidhu. He was able to give a geospatial data replay of the Iran strikes: here and here.

It is amazing how far we've come since Nelson's sceptical comments in the first episode with Nelson 9 months ago about whether or not we have AGI. Let's check back on his opinion of AGI in another 9 months.

Geoharbor is a solution from SketchMyView. It is a way to avoid notebook hell. This is done through all data engineers on a team using a common framework. I recommend a watch to see Rakesh showing it in action.

We are privileged today to share an episode with a Pakistani geospatial firm, Seerab Technologies. Zulkifil is a co-founder and has been with the company nearly 10 years. They have their own platform for real estate developers to help customers understand the context of proposed property purchases. He gave a simple example, a property with a large hole in it is hard to spot if you don’t have a terrain map. Seerab provides that to users. He also stepped through a few prizes they have won, including from Uber. Nice to have some lessons learnt from a firm all the way over in Pakistan telling us how product development is done.

What was most interesting to hear is the timeless advice he shared applies everywhere. We’re so used to hearing it from Silicon Valley, but his is a story of applying it successfully a world away - Seerab has been in business for years.

Finally, Zulkifil talks about doing good. According to Gemini:

"The Hajj is one of the world's largest annual gatherings, with over 1.8 million to 2.5 million pilgrims converging on Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for five to six days of rituals. It is a mandatory, once-in-a-lifetime duty for all adult Muslims who are physically and financially capable."

One may imagine with so many people scrambling across a relatively small area on foot, in an unfamiliar place, there is a risk of getting lost. So Zulkifil showed us a solution based on listening to Pakistani pilgrims going to the Hajj.

Thanks Zulkifil for taking the time!

This is episode 3/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena. In this episode, Alex steps through system characteristics of weather foundation models and how we can approach building them. Toward the end, the episode touches on an example of applying these approaches to a simulation of the Earth’s weather over a period of 800 years. The approaches Alex has been talking about enable the use of a GPU to process this simulation in only one day. We conclude with the values that drive Alex’s work.

This is episode 2/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena In this episode, Alex steps through ML weather models, their history and how they work.

Links to items discussed:

1. ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5): https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5
2. I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taught me: https://www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fooled-by-ai-for-science-hypeheres

This is episode 1/3 with Alex Merose about his thoughts on weather foundation models. He is a member of the technical staff at Open Athena. In this episode, Alex steps through the background on doing weather prediction, from early efforts around a century ago to numerical and physics based models. This prepares us for later episodes on machine learning or AI based approaches.

Links to items discussed:

1. Pangeo, a community for open, reproducible, scalable geoscience.
2. Alex's Google Scholar profile.
3. Episode with Sergei Nozdrenkov on a coral reef foundation model.
4. Global Climate Data Collaboration: The Intentional Dream by George Dyson.
5. Hurricane Melissa.
6. Arham Ansari on GeoRiskAI.
7. What can a technologist do about climate change.

Mark Munsell is Distinguished Fellow of Artificial Intelligence at Lindenwood University and Executive Director at GeoSTL. He is also Former Chief AI Officer at the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. As such, he has rich experience for us to mine. We used it to navigate the AI hype and transition from LLMs to world models. If you want to get an impression of him outside this episide, here he is at SC25 talking about Pixels, Petabytes, Predictions (and Possibilities!):

He was also recently published in The Cypher Brief.

EPISODE TOPICS:

1. What Mark achieved as an inventor.

2. His reflections on hype cycles after a career in geospatial.

3. Using this experience to examine the meaning of world models.

4. Notable achievements by world model companies.

5. GEOINT use case: Venezuela and the US.

6. Mark's ambitions for St Louis: GeoSTL.

7. How the World Model 500 can help.

The Geospatial FM podcast topic profile:

1. Data engineering for geospatial

2. GEOSPATIAL FOR WORLD MODELS (foundation models are so last week)

3. GEOSPATIAL IN PREDICTION MARKETS (spatial finance is so 2022)

4. In this context, stocks, globally

5. Human rights outcomes of these stocks

Item 5 is always number 1. So we are finishing the year with that focus. Let's look at this BBC article about a murder of a tribal landowner to make way for the world's largest dictator vanity project, The Line in Saudi Arabia: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-52375343. Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti spoke in this video before he was murdered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Mp_CKbjdE. One thing he predicted was being framed by the government surrounding his dead body with weapons. They did report finding his body in such a state: https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadFile?gId=35599. Another BBC article profiles Col Rabih Alenezi https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445. He said he was a security force leader who was asked by the government to, if necessary, kill villages who resisted eviction. He refused and escaped to the UK. Whoever replaced him obviously was not so upstanding, and Abdul Rahim al-Hwaiti was killed. 

So we have a suitably arresting human rights issue to examine for the podcast. I then used The UN's Communication Report and Search tool (https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/Tmsearch/TMDocuments) to find out about the western companies involved, an issue flagged by the BBC. I found a UN Letter of Urgent Appeal to AECOM: https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=28030. The communication search tool shows the CEO, Mr Rudd, does not appear to have responded to the letter. It is significant that AECOM was a recipient, because they're the best international design firm according to Engineering News Record (https://www.enr.com/toplists/2025-top-500-design-firms-preview). Last year it was Jacbos, also a delivery partner on The Line, but they have not received a letter of urgent appeal.

In the letter, reference is made to an earlier one about the killing of Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti (https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=25483). The UN accompanied that letter a week later with a summary for the public: https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136322. 

In tying up loose ends, I observed that another recipient of such a letter was Solar Water. They announced in 2019 what they were doing for NEOM: https://www.solarwaterplc.com/company-news/green-technology-in-the-neom-project-and-others-how-will-it-change-the-rules-of-the-game-in-the-gulf/. Five years later, however, after receiving the letter (https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=28049), they gave up $100 million by cancelling the project: https://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-aw-canceled-100m-neom-contract-human-rights-abuse-saudi-2024-5. 

AECOM has done no such thing. They could not even bear to respond to the letter. Despite being a signatory to the UN Global Compact (https://unglobalcompact.org/what-is-gc/participants/17780-AECOM-Technology-Corporation).

AECOM is in the Consultancy vertical of the World Model 500. The podcast remains faithful to its 5 topics. Topic 5, human rights, is always number 1. Please accept, dear Mr. Rudd, the assurances of my highest consideration.