Geospatial FM

Michael Ferrari is Chief Scientific and Investment Officer at AlphaGeo. We focused on how resilience varies across geographies and what this means for long term regional investability. Accompanying this discussion is their web app. This is confronting. If you change the time slider to "End of Century", most of the world is red, indicating significant physical climate risk.

Particularly alarming is when you change the toggle to "Resilience Adjusted Risk". This intensifies the red color in some parts of the world - Sub Saharan Africa, India, Pakistan, Yemen, Papua New Guinea and along the coast from French Guiana to Venezuela. This indicates that these countries have low resilience and limited capacity to combat the effects of climate change. There are implications here for population migrations, as illustrated by AlphaGeo here with regard to Africa.

The conversation then turned to another app, produced in collaboration with Washington Post. Here one can input your location in the US and you will be given useful information from the perspective of a property investor on long term risk and resilience.

Parag Khanna is the CEO. He has given several interesting TED talks such as how megacities are changing the map of the world.

Perhaps the most fascinating idea of all though from Parag is Periodic Table of States, details here. For this analysis it all comes down to stability and they rank Eritrea as worst with a score of 2.36. They rank Switzerland best at 21.77.

Overall, a fascinating crash course from Michael on the kind of spatial finance I like - using geography to inform investment decisions. It was a case of meeting my idols. I am glad we were able to hit it off and am keen to see what develops.

Border Professor Henk van Houtum published Free The Map in 2024. He sent it to me whilst I was still living in London last year. Shows how long this has been in the making as I've since migrated to the States. Kind of fitting, given the book frequently mentions the EU migration crisis and problems with EU Frontex maps showing how many come from where. As a key intervention, the book recommends 'counter mapping'. An example of this for the Frontex mapping is Frontex: EU's Deportation Machine.

We began by talking about differences in freedom through passports, here is a link to Passport Index. We also talked about MAGA geography, with this great map from Representative Robert Garcia.

Speaking of geography, I wrote this poem years before meeting Henk. This is interesting because it reflects his points and was based on raw experiences I'd had at the time traveling through Southeast Asia. A big stimulus for Henk's arguments are these three maps, Fragile States Index, Corruption Perceptions Index and Freedom Map.

We are invited to consider a different perspective on the world and he puts the concept of counter maps before us in response. Examples of counter maps that step outside the gridded world of state cages start with Paul Butler's Facebook map from 2010.

This shows how little boundaries seem to matter, there are vast numbers of connections across national borders. Another great counter mapper is Python Maps. This individual publishes examples like world rivers colored by their hydrological basin.

This is an important type of border that the national borders template map of the world offers no detail on, or importance to. Another from the same source shows CO2 emissions.

Here there is a huge amount of emissions in the sea - a location where national border's don't apply. An effective counter map. We can continue with Al Jazeera's map of the world's oil and gas pipelines. The eye is invited to forget national borders exist.

An interesting example from Science-Metrix Inc is scientific collaborations 2005-9. This reminds us of the Facebook map with plenty of connections outside nations, but also several tight clusters of nations that collaborations occur across. Finally, if we are going to talk about countermapping and general visualisation beauty, we would be remiss to miss Globaia's incredible video welcoming us to the Antrhropocene.

Finally, I should mention that this was a deeply emotional episode to record for me. As shown in the Free The Map series of testimonial videos about my time across Cambodia and Kuwait, I needed to have this conversation with Henk in order to start to understand what I have witnessed in these terrible places. It is very helpful to have a book giving voice to what I have as a series of rage filled experiences. It was all summed up on page 39 of the book really.

So it is fitting that this page was shown throughout the video. Thank you Henk for taking the time to write this and to remind us that there is so much more to do than be a shill for national borders.

Appropriately, I am publishing today's episode from an airport - JFK. This is because it is about the positioning, navigation and timing vertical, specifically about how GPS can be spoofed and jammed, affecting air travel safety. Also appropriately, the recording with Dana Goward, President of Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, was occasionally of poor quality. The bandwidth gods have added a bit of ambience reflecting the jamming we talked about.

I found Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation through a Wired article - "A GPS Blackout Would Shut Down the World". Yes, I'm at the podcasting stage where I read Wired articles and just reach out to the people/organisations profiled ;-) Wired used a provocative but truthful title which, perversely, we can be proud of. This is because a vertical in The Geospatial Index is Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) companies. Companies, theory and technology in this vertical have, in Dana's words, produced a silent utility that the whole world has a critical dependence on. Well done to our industry, we are as vital as the water, power, sewer, telecom utilities! The PNT vertical is more well populated than others - 26 companies. There is a flyer in there recently, NextNav. I mentioned them during the episode with Dana and he gave some useful off the cuff commentary on the validity of their offering compared to other more economical solutions.

It was a fascinating episode. If you've ever wondered about those maps showing GNSS spoofing and jamming, Dana, a highly accomplished pilot, gave us a lengthy commentary on what they mean and spoke to some geographies where there is a strong risk of this silent utility failing to work properly.

A note about running the podcast. It is an experience of talking with some highly accomplished and capable guests. Reading Dana's profile, on gps.gov no less, gives one pause. I got lucky here - I did not read this profile before talking with him. I am glad, because I would have been a deer in the headlights. Some quotes:

"...he served as the maritime navigation authority for the United States with 12 different business lines budgeted at over $1.3B/yr, and represented the United States at the International Maritime Organization, International Assn. of Lighthouse Authorities, U.N. anti-piracy working group, and other international forums."

He has received a humanitarian award for a coastguard chopper rescue:

"...Helicopter Association International’s Igor Sikorsky Humanitarian Service Award for his rescue of two fisherman at the height of Hurricane Chantal..."

As such, Dana has intimate, professional pilot experience of the risks of GNSS spoofing and jamming. As leader of the maritime navigation authority of the world's largest economy, he has the same degree of knowledge from the perspective of an administrator. This means his call to action as a leader regarding resilience of this silent utility is worth listening to. His charity, Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, is also worth joining.

One has to wonder when the US will become tired of the embarrassment of being behind the Chinese. Even in the domain of navigation system resilience, the States is behind. I am grateful to Dana for identifying the problem as not being money or technology, but a lack of leadership. He has put himself in front of us as the leader on this issue. Let's listen and study what he has to say, we might find the required actions are straightforward to implement: https://rntfnd.org/.

I came across Sergei Nozdrenkov through a post on LinkedIn saying:

"Hey friends, I’m looking for a founding engineer and founding AI research scientist to build multimodal foundation models for natural ecosystems, starting with 3D coral reef data."

He is the founder of Wildflow. This is a continuation of the nature data theme last touched on with Alex Logan in the episode about ⁠Cecil⁠.

Sergei is an overwhelming intellect. It is a source of great hope that someone of his calibre plans to make a multimodal foundation model to assist in the understanding of coral reefs. Usually they're optimising dark patterns on social media platforms or designing weapons. So Sergei is a light of hope and optimism in the emerging foundation models industry.

He was so patient. He enthusiastically fielded my initial questions about the basics of foundation models and LLMs before then going into incredible detail on conservation methods for coral reefs. Without hesitation he included asides like a quick explanation of Gaussian Splatting.

Oh, and we started at the end of his product roadmap: terraforming. Yes, that's how much we covered. I don't really have much to say except that I present this as assistance to those responding to his call for founding engineer and founding AI scientist. He checks all the boxes for an inspirational, broad minded leader capable of humor.

Sergei has seen and done an incredible amount - yet he retains a childlike curiosity and enthusiasm. We have a lot to learn from him.

Upping the cadence here as the backlog is growing again and I need to get things out whilst they’re fresh. Today we’ve got BigGeo on the chopping block, a Canadian cloud based geospatial company. Brent Lane, CEO, was an inspiring speaker because (showing my bias here) he had another story about ringing the bell at the NYSE to tell us about.

This is the second time we’ve had someone on that’s done this, the first was Gillian Mollod regarding The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). To be precise, in Brent’s case it was the closing bell. So it’s inspiring to be working through the roster of people in geospatial who’ve walked the hallowed halls of this institution. Who knew they existed!

What is BigGeo? Datalab: A workspace to prepare, manage, and optimize data for analysis, visualization and delivery. Marketplace: A hub designed to showcase, explore, and seamlessly source a wide range of datasets. Datascape: A tool for geospatial visualization, data transformation, and interactive analysis. It is interesting to see Felt there, a prior guest on the show.

We finished off with an idea on how to apply it all - a global parking lot dataset sold via their marketplace that can be used as the basis for predicting quarterly earnings for shops like Dunkin Donuts where car presence, detected via earth observation, provides insight on income.Thanks Brent for coming on and showing us another way to ring the bell!

As usual there is a connection through a number of episodes going on here. Back when interviewed Stephanie May, she introduced me to global base maps made by various tech companies. I jumped at the opportunity to continue the theme when I came across Jordan Regenie's write up of his involvement in Bing Maps. He mentioned a company participating in that effort was Compass Data so I dutifully pursued them for an episode and got Hayden Howard.

After that he gave me a free ticket to GeoWeek and I jumped on a flight from Atlanta to a SHOCKINGLY cold Denver for a stunned, disoriented walk around the exhibit hall for a few hours talking to as many companies as I could. I came across several ground penetrating radar solutions. This included one on a towball which could detect buried services at highway speeds (Impulse Radar). Impressive stuff. I also saw the other end of the spectrum, pushcarts which are used to produce the fluoro graffiti footpath markings you see about buried gas, power, fibre optic lines (Screening Eagle).

I was curious about starting my own business, so I kept investigating. I went to a Georgia Geospatial Association networking event in Atlanta soon after and got talking with the CEO Michael Bellrose of Tri-Global Technologies, a positioning company. He put me in touch with Dan Bigman, CEO of Bigman Geophysical.

And that's how some of these episodes happen! Literally a journey across American geospatial to hunt down these conversations for you. It was a good one. Dan told us a CSI type story to start with, about how archaeology and ground penetrating radar can be used for crime scene investigation. It was gruesome, but a good illustration of how our broader discipline benefits society - something which has been a common theme the past string of episodes about SAR for bushfire and warzone damage assessment.

Here we continue the radar theme but using different, more proximate technology, requiring someone to push a device over the ground rather than wait for a satellite. Do I want to start such a business myself? Well it is tempting. A second hand pushcart is only about $15,000. With another $5k around that with a website, marketing and a cheap truck one could get to hustling the pavement. Thanks Dan for being my second Atlanta guest as I begin to orient myself regarding opportunities in America.

Brett Clark is Director Global Sales at Blackshark. Blackshark is an incredible company. They are responsible for the global 3D world of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Now they have a system called ORCA™ HUNTR.

This is a no-code environment enabling users—with little to no coding or AI background—to train, test, and deploy object detection and classification models on RGB imagery, including satellite, aerial, drone, or even JPEG/video frames. It also offers real-time feedback during training: as you label (“scribble” with a crayon-like brush), it immediately shows model results and entropy metrics, guiding where more data is needed.

Listen in for an example of how this system was put into action for the #LAFires response. They used it to detect 300 buildings the county was unaware of. This matters for clean up after fires, because there is significantly more debris and material movement to plan for.

Brett was a supremely cool dude. I have interviewed some of the finest operators in sales in geospatial on this podcast. Brett is clearly the best so far.

Conflict Ecology is a geospatial research lab led by Jamon Van Den Hoek, Associate Professor of Geography at Oregon State University. I have been privileged to profile many leaders in our industry through this podcast. None, until now, routinely appear on TV and have the work of their lab used in print media. Jamon is a hero to us all and we are so privileged to have an hour of his time.

Continuing the EO Summit coverage, another attendee was Alex Logan, co-founder and CEO of Cecil. This is a nature data platform which began with trees. They focus on metadata, more here. It was a fascinating discussion. I am new to this space and there is a strong overlap with those in carbon credit and biodiversity markets. What I appreciate the most is the emergence of financial materiality. For example, The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) is taking care of the US. In the EU things are more advanced, Nature Restoration Regulation. There is also the EU’s Regulation on Deforestation-free Products. All of this means an exciting data and app ecosystem is flourishing.

For example, I was invited to join Cecil’s Slack. A torrent of founders joined, one after the other introducing exciting new software facilitating the progress and insight intended by these disclosure frameworks and regulations. It is also a space filled with optimistic, conscientious people with the right future in mind. I am happy to have found them as these are my people. This is where I come from. This is the future I was brought up to build.

Podcasting like this is a high paced, enticing discovery experience. I keep talking with inspiring people. Each episode is a small practice session on a possible future.

Thanks for being our guide for nature data Alex, thanks also for sponsoring the Nature Data for Finance meetup on the EO Summit sidelines.

I was privileged to be granted access as a member of the press to EO Summit by the convener, Aravind (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aravindravichandran/). I am now delivering on my duty providing coverage for you here. Adam Maher (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-maher-17969731/) is CEO and Founder at Ursa Space Systems Inc (https://ursaspace.com/). He participated in the Commodity Intelligence panel at the Summit (https://www.eosummit.com/eos2025/detailed-program). Conveniently, that is also the subject of this episode. So, for those who couldn't make it this is a chance to get a flavor of the event. It was a privilege to have Adam's time and attention. I know from organising this episode that he is a very busy man.

Another upcoming guest from the summit will be Alex Logan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-logan-cecil/). He will be talking about how they do nature data at Cecil.