Spatial Stack with Matt Forrest

We have never had more data about our planet: petabytes of satellite imagery, aerial photos, and sensor readings collected daily. Yet, turning that massive volume of "noise" into a clear signal remains the fundamental challenge of the geospatial industry.

In this episode of the Spatial Stack, I sit down with the engineering and product minds from Wherobots: Ryan, Phil, and Len - to tear down the architecture required to hand...

There are trillions of dollars invested in the physical world every da: infrastructure, supply chains, and our planet.

Yet many of these massive decisions are made without the data to back them up. For too long, geospatial analytics has been gated behind specialized teams and siloed technology, treated as "spatial is special" rather than just another data type.

In this episode, we sit down with Damian Wiley from Whero...

Large Language Models can write poetry and debug code, but they still don't understand the fundamental physics of the real world. Ask an AI to find the "nearest restaurant" to a specific coordinate, and it struggles because it lacks Spatial Intelligence.

In this episode, we sit down with Jia Yu, the co-creator of Apache Sedona and co-founder of Wherobots, to discuss why geospatial data breaks standard big data engines and how he bui...

In 1963, the US Postal Service introduced "Mr. Zip" to make mail delivery faster. They never intended for those five digits to determine your insurance premiums, your home value, or your health outcomes.

In this short deep-dive, we explore how an arbitrary logistical tool became a shorthand for community and why that’s dangerous. From the misleading boundaries of Dallas, Texas, to the tragic data failures during the Flint wate...

Maps have been around for thousands of years, but what they represent and how they work is changing faster than ever.

In this episode, I’m joined by Cliff Allison, who has spent more than 30 years building enterprise-scale mapping systems for governments and global organizations. Today, he leads government global sales at TomTom, helping bring modern, AI-powered mapping infrastructure to some of the most demanding use cases in...

We have an incredible amount of public geospatial data—high-resolution elevation, weather forecasts, floodplain maps, real-time sensors—yet most people still can’t easily answer a simple question:

“What’s my flood risk right here, right now?”

In this episode, I’m joined by Kevin Bullock, an aerospace engineer and remote sensing expert at Development Seed, to talk about how he turned years of ...

If there’s one word to describe the past year in geospatial, it’s change.

In this solo episode, I take you behind the scenes of what I’ve been seeing, hearing, and working on across geospatial, cloud, and AI over the past year, and how those shifts are shaping what actually matters heading into 2026 .

I talk about:

- Where AI is real vs overhyped in geospatial workflows
- Why cloud-native geospatial has quietly cr...

GeoPandas is one of the most important tools in modern GIS, but many people still aren’t sure when to use it, why it matters, or where it fits alongside tools like PostGIS, DuckDB, Apache Sedona, and cloud-native data formats.

In this video, I break down GeoPandas from the ground up: what it is, how it works under the hood, its strengths and limitations, and when to choose something else. If you’ve ever worked in ArcGIS ...

Meta has more than 3 billion users across Instagram, WhatsApp, and even its new AR glasses. Behind the scenes, all of them are powered by one thing: maps. But instead of relying on closed systems, Meta is betting big on open data—and building its own global map.

In this episode, I talk with Said Turksever from Meta, who leads their open mapping strategy. We dive into:

🌍 Why Meta cares so much about maps
🛠 The tools they&rs...

ArcGIS Pro has been the center of GIS workflows for decades but how does it hold up in a world moving toward open, cloud-native, and AI-powered geospatial tools? In this video, I break down what ArcGIS Pro actually is, where it shines, where it struggles, and how it fits into the modern GIS ecosystem.

Whether you’re doing personal GIS projects, running a small team, or architecting enterprise-scale systems, this deep dive wil...

In this episode, I sit down with Felix Palmer, creator of A5, a new global grid system that’s redefining how we represent and analyze the Earth.
Felix shares how a 1980s math paper led him to build a pentagon-based global grid, one that fixes the distortions found in systems like H3 and S2, achieving true equal-area cells across the entire planet.

We discuss the geometry behind A5, the trade-offs of global gridding, and why...

What does it really take to teach AI to understand our planet?

In this episode, Matt sits down with Isaac Corley, Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Wherobots and maintainer of TorchGeo, and Christopher Ren, Data Scientist and writer behind some of the most thought-provoking essays on Earth observation and AI.

They dive deep into the state of Geospatial AI from embeddings and foundation models to how these tools are reshaping Earth ...

AI can answer almost anything, except “where.” That gap is huge, and  Kieran McCann from Mapbox is working to close it.

In this episode of The Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Kieran, who’s spent six years helping Mapbox quietly power some of the most widely used maps and location services in the world. From his early days doing grunt map edits at Apple Maps to shaping Mapbox’s next big bet: AI-native ...

GeoAI isn’t just another buzzword, it’s a turning point for the entire geospatial industry. In this episode of The Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Tee Barr, Director at Verisk and Councilor for the American Geographical Society, to unpack why GeoAI could reshape the field as profoundly as GPS once did.

From climate risk and supply chain resilience to defense, finance, and human security, Tee explains how AI is already...

What happens when a geospatial professional decides to map the entire business of our industry?

In this episode of Spatial Stack, Matt talks with Wilfred Waters, the creator of the first-ever Geospatial Index, a hand-built list tracking hundreds of public companies shaping maps, data, satellites, sensors, and spatial software. Will shares how he spent countless late nights pulling together every geospatial stock he could find, from ...

What if satellites became as smart and as accessible as your smartphone?

In this episode, I sit down with Michael Bartholomeusz, CEO of NOVI to unpack how Earth observation is being transformed by edge computing in space. We explore the shift from sending terabytes of raw imagery to delivering actionable insights, and why this change could take the cost of analysis from $150,000 down to under $1,000.

Michael shares stories from his 2...

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Qiusheng Wu, associate professor, open-source advocate, and creator of some of the most widely used tools in modern geospatial, including Leafmap and GeoAI. If you’ve ever watched his YouTube tutorials or come across his projects on GitHub, you already know the impact he’s had on the community.

We dive into:

His newly released Python for Geospatial book, one of the most complete guides...

Open data is supposed to unlock innovation, but what happens when “open” isn’t really open?

In this episode of The Spatial Stack, I sit down with return guest Mina Nada to explore the world of open data licenses — from Creative Commons to Open Database Licenses and beyond. We break down what these licenses actually allow you to do, where the pitfalls are, and how they impact anyone building geospatial product...

What happens when a hackathon project becomes one of the most influential open-source BI tools in the world?

In this episode, we sit down with Max Beauchemin — creator of Apache Superset and Apache Airflow — and Evan Rusackas from Preset, the company behind Superset’s enterprise evolution.

We explore:

The origin story of Superset at Airbnb — and why Max says it became his “life’s mission”
H...