Journal
Practical guides on GIS work, satellite imagery, deforestation rules, and carbon monitoring. Written by the team building Yerin.
The EU Deforestation Regulation applies from 30 December 2026. For palm oil, rubber, coffee, and cocoa suppliers, the hardest part is spatial: a clean, accurate polygon for every plot. Here's what that involves.
Read the article →Sentinel-2 and Landsat cover most monitoring work at no cost. Here's when commercial imagery from Airbus, Planet, or Vantor (formerly Maxar) earns its price, what it costs in 2026, and the licensing trap to avoid.
Read the article →A free, open-source, cloud-native GIS that loads, edits, and analyzes spatial data on your device. What it does well, where QGIS still wins, and when we'd use it.
Read the article →General chatbots can talk about maps. A GIS assistant has to understand coordinate systems, geometries, and imagery, and work inside the tools you already use. Here's what that means in practice.
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Lab notes
COG for rasters you read in pieces over HTTP. GeoParquet for large vector tables you query with DuckDB. PMTiles for map tiles as one static file. STAC for searching imagery catalogs. Learn these four and most modern tools make sense.
We asked the community for maintained, open tools to draw forest stand profiles. Candidates so far: the USDA Stand Visualization System (SVS), which is public domain; CAPSIS, an open forest-modelling platform; and SIMANFOR, a web-based stand simulator. Still testing.
Free, open-source statistics from the University of Amsterdam, with an SPSS-like interface built on R. Covers t-tests, ANOVA, regression, and Bayesian versions of most tests, with plots that update live. Good for thesis work without license costs.
When a report needs global or national context, like forest area or emissions over time, OWID has clean, documented, downloadable datasets with sources for every chart.
More of our writing on Medium.