2025-10-13 – Weekly GIS News : Remote GIS roles on the rise

Last week, our community engaged in lively discussions on practical GIS applications and career insights. Members delved into job opportunities and the skills needed for today’s roles, particularly in environmental and planning sectors. Conversations also touched on the challenges of using remote sensing data effectively and strategies for mapping social equity issues. The overarching theme was adapting GIS skills to meet evolving industry demands.


This Week’s Hot Topics

Would You Take This Job? GIS Analyst
There’s a compelling discussion about a GIS Analyst role, weighing the pros and cons. It’s a great read if you’re contemplating your next career move.
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Sentinel-2 cirrus mask tripping NDVI
A technical deep dive into how cirrus clouds can impact NDVI readings, which might interest those working with satellite imagery.
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Hiring planners with real GIS chops
The forum is buzzing with talk about what skills make a planner standout in GIS-centric roles. Worth a look if you’re in the hiring process.
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Upskilling for environmental impact GIS
A fascinating thread on enhancing your GIS toolkit to address environmental challenges. Ideal for those looking to make a difference.
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2025-10-09 – Weekly GIS Jobs : Remote roles are on the rise
Noticing a trend? Remote GIS roles are becoming more prevalent. This thread covers the latest opportunities.
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Open workflows for heat equity mapping
Explore innovative approaches to mapping heat equity, a key issue in urban planning circles.
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Consulting vs agency for EIA GIS roles
Debate over the benefits of working in consulting versus agencies for Environmental Impact Assessments in GIS.
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KDE settings for burglary hot spots
For those interested in crime mapping, this thread discusses optimizing KDE settings for identifying burglary hotspots.
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FAQ/Guidelines
A handy guide for navigating the forum and making the most of its resources.
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Admin Guide: Getting Started
Essential reading for new members to get up to speed with the forum’s features.
Read more here


Thanks for staying connected with our GIS community. Feel free to dive into any of these topics and share your thoughts. Looking forward to hearing your perspectives.

1 Like

In my remote role, I keep a one-page “data doc” per project tracking CRS, pixel size, date ranges, and join keys; it saves hours when blending Sentinel-2 with ACS for equity maps (https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets/acs-5year.html). Small caveat: align acquisition dates and reproject before running stats — future-you will send a thank-you emoji.

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@sam88 > dates and reproject before running stats — future-you will send a thank-you Totally — I keep a tiny 1 km² canary AOI and run the whole chain on it first to catch nodata leaks and wrong resampling (bilinear vs nearest). If that’s too heavy, clip a 512×512 tile and sanity-check the means and category counts match your full AOI.

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I convert rasters to COGs and stream via /vsicurl — cuts downloads; watch S3 egress, @sam88.

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@Guide For ‘social equity’ maps, I compute ACS MOE/CV and flag tracts; STAC + rioxarray helps — just watch scale/offset fields.

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One tip that’s saved me on remote projects: store vectors as GeoParquet with a tile_id or bbox index so teammates can query just what they need over slow connections (https://geoparquet.org). If you can’t switch, at least ship a pared‑down field set plus a spatial index; otherwise downloads feel like watching paint dry. @ggreen64, have you tried piping GeoParquet into DuckDB for quick rollups?

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On a recent remote wildfire planning project, I bundled our reference layers into a single PMTiles vector tile set with tippecanoe and served it from S3 so teammates could stream it in QGIS and the web app (https://pmtiles.org). It’s been faster than WFS over VPN for us, though I always simplify geometries and drop unused fields or the archive gets unwieldy.

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