| Welcome to the OSGeo:UK Newsletter |
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Welcome (back?!) to the OSGeo:UK newsletter where we share updates and information every couple of months about the OSGeo:UK local chapter, along with general FOSS for geospatial goodness. Please share the newsletter widely so that interested friends and colleagues can sign up too. For now, enjoy this edition. |
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Find out more about OSGeo:UK and how you can be part of our community on our website. |
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FOSS4G:UK 2025 Planning is well underway for FOSS4G:UK Leeds 2025 and it's going to be an amazing event! As has been mentioned in previous newsletters, this will be our biggest gathering since Edinburgh 2019 and while the event will focus on open source software, it is also a long overdue opportunity for us all to meet to share knowledge and experiences, learn new tools, and establish new relationships.
FOSS4G:UK will occur in Leeds on October 1st and 2nd. Registration is open with tickets costing £110, to cover a full programme of over 40 talks and workshops over the two days. If you submitted a proposal for a presentation or workshop then you will have heard back from the organisers by now. The full programme will be available online soon.
The three conference keynote speakers bring a lot of talent to the table and will all be worth listening to. The following biographic summaries highlight the main areas that they will be talking about: - Kathryn Berger, Lead Data Scientist at DSIT, combines over 15 years of academic and private sector experience in geospatial modelling for disease risk and global health, with a commitment to making machine learning tools accessible through open science.
- Mariam Crichton, CEO of 7 Satya and INSPIRE Lead for Women+ in Geospatial, is an entrepreneurial leader with 17 years of experience transforming tech startups into scale-ups while focusing on environmental and social impact through geospatial solutions.
- Alasdair Rae, Head of Data and Spatial Analysis at Lanpro, brings over 20 years of geographic data analysis experience, having worked with clients ranging from Google and the BBC to government agencies, and is a published author and former Professor in Urban Studies who advocates for open data in the GIS community.
Finally, the conference wouldn't happen without sponsorship, so we want to thank every one of the sponsor organisations listed below for supporting the conference. |
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We need you!
Did you know that you can submit news stories to be highlighted in this newsletter? Just fill out the form with suitable details and we will add them to a future newsletter issue. And now we have a new call. We are looking for individuals to write a short thought piece, no more than a few hundred words, for inclusion in future newsletters. Use the same link to submit an idea, which can be about anything to do with the concept of 'open' in geospatial, and we'll get back to you if we'd like you to write that up. |
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GoFundGeo There continue to be updates and activity on the projects supported by GoFundGeo. For instance, the qgis2web plugin released version 3.27.0 on 7 Jul 2025. This release added symlinks to the install of QtWebEngine to locate the Qt Frameworks for preview on macOS as well as support to read embedded SVG Marker symbology and improved address searches. Whilst Geoserver 3 ramps up development, the developers are still pushing updates to the v2 line. The latest release came on July 18th and is a stable release recommended for production use - follow that link for all the details. Similarly, James Milner is keeping up with development on TerraDraw. All the latest and greatest changes can be followed on the GitHub page. Recent closed pull-requests suggest that development around Storybook integration as well as bug fixes and updates to the documentation. Remember, everyone on the OSGeo:UK committee encourages you to submit bids later in the year for a project or projects that you would like to see funded by us through GoFundGeo.
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Just to remind you, there is a funding call for a security enhancement to the project so that it adheres to upcoming changes in regulations and laws. If you use QGIS in a large corporate entity then please make your IT department aware of this. As a QGIS user, you and your organisation are community members so please urge your organisation to contribute to the funding call. And there is a lot going on in the world of QGIS! First off, a new release has happened since the last newsletter. All the details of version 3.44 are available online. Alongside the development of version 3 software there has been an announcement about the upcoming version 4 development. Version 4 of QGIS is due for release in October and will migrate to Qt6, the cross-platform application framework that QGIS is built on. There are three main benefits to doing this:
- To future-proof the QGIS codebase.
- To take advantage of performance and security improvements.
- To simplify maintenance and development pipelines.
This is an exciting next step for probably the biggest software project in open geospatial, and all the details can be found online using the link posted above. It'll be exciting to see who is talking about and looking forward to this next release when we are up in Leeds! After an extended development period there is news on the incorporation of the geoparquet file format into MacOS and Linux builds. The summary is that OpenGIS are releasing MacOS builds (and previewing QGIS4!) and are looking for extensive testing through to October. If you can help then please provide feedback directly to the OpenGIS team. The development has involved understanding how the installer works and modifying that to handle conda based installations. For those of you that understand packaging of software, there has also been the adoption of vcpkg as conda was limited when creating a portable installer (dmg) or needing complete control over the build process.
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Continue to check out the global FOSS4G event website for the latest information about the global gathering taking place in November. If you are attending from the UK then let us know through one of our social media channels!
And just to remind you that our friends over at the AGI (Association for Geographic Information) have a conference coming up in Cardiff in October (see details here). Again, if you attend this then please let us know - or even provide a short write-up for this newsletter! |
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You'll never guess what is happening elsewhere! ISRIC (the International Soil Reference and Information Centre) a body interested in generating more rigorous data about soils, has produced nine topsoil property layers for Europe. This is provided at 20 m spatial resolution through a web map interface and is still in beta testing. According to a post on LinkedIn, the SoilSuite products of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and covariates characterising geology, climate and terrain were combined with LUCAS soil data to train a Quantum Random Forest model for predicting soil properties and their uncertainties. The product will make available data on soil organic carbon content, total nitrogen, texture and other parameters. There is a call for users to test the product and provide feedback. Go check it out! |
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We all know that it's been a very hot and dry spring and summer this year. And that means wildfires. Not a phrase readily associated with the UK, but one that will likely become more familiar in the decades to come. According to a piece of research by the Carbon Brief website, "wildfires have scorched more than 40,000 hectares of land so far this year across the UK ...[which is]... an area more than twice the size of ... Glasgow". The data used in the assessment came from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), a joint initiative between GEO and Copernicus. A number of useful tools can be found on the GWIS website. The Carbon Brief article reports that "fire services in England and Wales responded to 564 wildfires ...[between]... January to June 2025 – an increase from 69 fires in the same period last year". This report comes when, at the time of writing, the Arthur's Seat blaze in Edinburgh has been heavily reported, and when the UK is in its fourth period of very hot weather. |
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We hope that you found this edition of the newsletter interesting and informative. If you have any feedback or comments then let us know! |
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