Ground Truth
A blog by Nearmap
From imagery, to insights, to answers. Explore the latest posts and new perspectives emerging in the world of location intelligence.All
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What is machine learning in GIS?
is machine learning in GIS? What is machine learning in GIS? Dec 2024 Dec 2024 In our fast-changing world, machine learning in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is reshaping how industries operate, from construction and engineering to government and insurance . By combining machine learning with geospatial data, organisations can gain fresh insights that inform smarter decisions. Explore what machine learning means for spatial analysis, learn its benefits, and examine how Nearmap is leveraging these technologies to drive innovation in this dynamic field. What is machine learning for geospatial analysis? Machine learning for geospatial data refers to the application of algorithms that enable computers to learn from and make predictions based on geospatial information. By integrating machine learning into GIS, organisations can enhance their spatial analysis capabilities, enabling more informed decision-making. Machine learning models thrive on diverse spatial data, such as terrain maps, population density statistics, and environmental conditions. This approach provides the foundation for valuable new applications, from urban planning to disaster response. At Nearmap, we’ve integrated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into our aerial imagery processes, enabling us to deliver insights at an impressive scale. According to Dr Michael Bewley, Senior Director of AI Systems at Nearmap, “We do AI at the same scale that we do imagery.” With each aerial survey, our customers gain access to over 150 AI-derived insights about specific locations — covering everything from vegetation to construction sites. AI Layers Building Med & High Vegetation What are the advantages of machine learning in GIS? The combination of GIS and machine learning comes with some fantastic benefits for organisations: Enhanced accuracy : One of the standout benefits is improved accuracy. Machine learning algorithms minimise human error by leveraging large datasets, allowing for insights that manual methods might miss. Nearmap AI models boast incredibly high accuracy, delivering results that are hard to achieve through traditional labelling methods. Increased efficiency : By automating data processing, we can analyse billions of features across vast areas simultaneously, which means faster insights and time saved for our customers. Predictive capabilities : With machine learning, GIS can help anticipate future trends based on historical data. This is invaluable for sectors like urban planning and disaster management, where proactive decision-making is crucial. Scalability : The power of machine learning means we can handle large datasets with ease. This scalability is essential for comprehensive geospatial analysis, particularly in complex fields like environmental science and urban development. Applications of machine learning in GIS Machine learning is already making waves in various applications, including: Urban planning : By analysing factors like population density and land use, machine learning can help urban planners make informed decisions about resource allocation and development. Environmental monitoring : By processing environmental data, machine learning uses image segmentation techniques to help track changes in land use, monitor deforestation, and assess climate change impacts. Transportation and logistics : Optimising route planning and analysing traffic patterns are just a couple of ways machine learning is streamlining transportation and logistics. Disaster management : Machine learning aids in predicting and managing natural disasters by analysing both historical and real-time data, enabling quicker and more effective responses. The Nearmap approach to AI and machine learning We’ve developed a seamless system that combines aerial imagery with AI and machine learning to deliver enhanced insights to our customers. With our latest updates, users can access more than 130 data layers organised into AI Packs, providing valuable, scaleable geospatial intelligence on a wide range of features — from roof conditions to surface types. Then imagine the possibilities with 3D mapping data — our immersive high-resolution visuals let you see your project environment in full context. Whether it’s a detailed 3D mesh for urban planning or assessing changes over time with our robust historical library, Nearmap technology provides a comprehensive view that transforms traditional approaches to location intelligence . Gain fresh insights that inform smarter decisions. Get in touch with our team of experts today to learn how machine learning in GIS could transform your workflows. Get in touch
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Put your team on the same map with...
and share Put your team on the same map with... Dec 2024 Dec 2024 At Nearmap, when we ask for your feedback, we’re always listening. Many of you had let us know that you’d love to be able to collaborate and comment in real time on projects in MapBrowser. Now you can! The challenge: collaboration bottlenecks 25% of productivity is lost through ineffective project collaboration 1 . 70% of workers agree that poor collaboration is limiting their productivity and wasting their time 2 . 61% believe better collaboration would result in greater business growth opportunities 3 . The solution: Share MapBrowser projects Now you can easily share a project in MapBrowser with others on your subscription or in your organisation, making teamwork more seamless by helping you all work together on the same map. When you share a MapBrowser project, you can choose view or edit permissions, to ensure your projects are managed according to your preferred access settings. How to create a project: When you browse any location in MapBrowser, the area is saved by default as ‘Untitled Project’. You can name your project by clicking on the name and typing a title, or to create a new project you can click the Projects icon at the top of the sidebar menu, and in the dialog window, click NEW PROJECT. If you don’t wish to create a project, just leave the title as is and continue browsing as normal. You can also add labels to projects to help keep track of your work. Projects are saved automatically as you work, so there’s no need to manually save changes. Collaborate in real time Collaboration is a huge improvement for teamwork. Once you’ve shared project in MapBrowser, other people with access to the same project can see comments and mark-ups in real time. Clearer communication across your projects helps reduce delays and minimising errors. Commenters can tag tag other team members in the project, with all comments viewable in a single panel. To add a comment, click the Comment icon in the top toolbar in MapBrowser. You’ll see a comment callout appear on the map — you can drag that to the relevant location on the map and click to insert. Roofing contractors, we’ve got your back. To streamline commercial and residential roofing projects, make notes about features on a roof and share them with your team without having to export and make annotations in other software – do it it all in MapBrowser. Get the window seat for airport logistics Simplify managing complicated traffic in and out of airport properties, and keep track of critical maintenance issues with a view of changes over time. Ensure the details are reflected across your team, helping keep to schedule for time-critical repairs and replacements. Supervise asset management, remotely Assign portions of the areas you’re managing to different team members so everyone is working with a consolidated source of truth – removing confusion and saving the need for each employee to export and then consolidate different annotated maps. Bring intelligence into urban planning Work with a single source of truth to make notes and share with teams including utilities and roadways , with the ability for all contributors and decision-makers to make notes and ensure everyone is informed. This brings a new level of efficiency into MapBrowser, helping you and your team work smarter, with clearer information and a real-time view of who’s doing what in your MapBrowser project. With collaboration, you can see measurements and comments made by other stakeholders in the same project, giving you a clear view of the latest project updates. Along with these updates, you’ll also notice that we’ve updated the dashboard in the MapBrowser MyAccount view. The new grid layout displays your projects in an intuitive layout. Each project tile has an action menu where you can open, duplicate, rename, or archive a project. You will also be able to see who’s currently working on a project, and their access level. Your notifications window in MapBrowser will appear in the top right of the screen, directly under the bell icon. What’s your view on these updates? We’d love to hear how these MapBrowser enhancements are helping you do more – let us know in this survey. Your feedback helps us shape future product updates coming your way. Take Survey
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Mapping minds, shaping the world: GIS Day 2024
GIS Day 2024 is dedicated to sharing, teaching, and inspiring others with GIS. This year, Nearmap celebrates the 25th anniversary of GIS Day with highlights from customers and employees!
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Restoring traditional country with aerial AI
traditional country with AI Restoring traditional country with aerial AI Nov 2024 Nov 2024 Play Combining traditional knowledge on Country with aerial imagery and AI insights, the Nari Nari Tribal Council is creating positive change for future generations. At SXSW Sydney in October 2024, Jamie Woods (Gayini Land Manager, Nari Nari Tribal Council ) presented alongside The Nature Conservancy (Vera Rullens, Geospatial Information Officer, and Mike Roache, Protected Landscapes Director) and Nearmap (M’Shenda Turner, Senior Director, Survey and Geospatial Content Operations) to share how geospatial insights from high-resolution aerial imagery and AI-data is informing ecologically enduring, sustainable land-management decisions. For more than 50,000 years, the land of Gayini in the NSW Murray-Darling Basin wrote its own story, and the Traditional Custodians listened, coexisting sustainably. But when the land was taken and developed for grazing and crops, channels and other structures were built to control flood waters, impacting vegetation, wildlife, and Indigenous communities. Located on the Murrumbidgee flood plain, one of the flattest landscapes on earth, the 88,000-hectare Gayini property is the size of 16 Sydney Harbours. With many inaccessible areas, understanding what is happening at ground level and observing change over time is crucial for effective ecological restoration and land management. The first image below shows the Nearmap capture footprint across Gayini, spanning 88,000 hectares. The second image below shows a map of Sydney overlaid with the capture outline of Gayini, for perspective on the property’s size. “Bringing 88,000 hectares of data into one image is so powerful” Mike Roache, Protected Landscapes Director, The Nature Conservancy. Gayini — back in the care of traditional owners As part of the Murray Darling basin plan, in 2018 the New South Wales Government bought the land that is now Gayini. The Nature Conservancy Australia, Nari Nari Tribal Council, the Centre for Ecosystem Science at the University of New South Wales and the Murray Darling Wetlands Working Group formed a consortium to care for the land. In 2019 when the Nari Nari Tribal Council regained ownership of Gayini, the landscape had been degraded by decades of manmade intervention, with irrigation channels and levees blocking or diverting the natural water flow. Water quality had deteriorated and wetlands were deprived of seasonal water, impacting flora and fauna. Today, once again under the care of the Nari Nari people, traditional knowledge combined with technology-driven insights is helping restore and protect the land and its wildlife. “The Nature Conservancy is interested in protecting nature and fresh water in Australia as the lifeblood of well-being, and we want to work with First Nations groups to help them back onto their country and manage it in perpetuity. Gayini is the perfect example of all those factors combining, and we do that with a scientific mindset,” said Mike Roache, Protected Landscapes Director. The geospatial technology toolkit: AI-powered insights As part of the land management practices under the Nari Nari Tribal Council, Nearmap provides high-resolution imagery of the entire Gayini property captured in two surveys each year around April and October delivering high-resolution imagery with a Ground Sample Distance* (GSD) resolution of 5.5cm—7.5cm, showing how the landscape changes from year to year. *Image clarity is measured by ‘ground sample distance’ (GSD) — the lower the number, the better the clarity. Satellite imagery generally offers around 30cm GSD. The image above shows Nearmap AI identifying different features in the landscape: medium and high vegetation in yellow; low vegetation in magenta; very low vegetation in green, and water bodies in blue. Gayini is home to populations of migratory and native birds and animals, and threatened species. When the water arrives, the land comes to life providing feeding grounds and rookeries for various birdlife – including Black Swans, Painted Snipe, Spotted Pardalote, Emus, Bitterns, Superb Parrots, the critically endangered Plains-wanderer, and Pelicans. In 2019, Jamie Woods and the Gayini land managers came across a family of five endangered Plains-wanderers — an exciting discovery. Today, spotters can identify 100–200 Plains-wanderers in one night — testament to the traditional management and regeneration practices being applied. The image below shows an area of the property where a levee was opened to let natural water flow through. Vera Rullens, Geospatial Information Officer at The Nature Conservancy, gains valuable information from Nearmap imagery across the entire property, including AI layers that automatically identify water bodies (lakes, rivers, swamps, wetlands and irrigation channels), and vegetation levels. “The more of these time points we’re capturing, the bigger the story gets, and the more we can understand how the property is changing and how management actions contribute to the changes,” said Vera. “Across the 88,000 hectare property, The Nature Conservancy works with 150-billion pixels of imagery with Nearmap AI — a huge dataset for us to work with — we can turn this data into maps that tell a story by looking at patterns.” From a land management perspective, to regenerate land from heavily modified agricultural use back to natural wetlands requires a natural flooding regime to be reinstated. The image above shows a series of surveys indicating where Nearmap AI detected water and vegetation. You can see that October 2022 was a wet year with heavy rainfall and a lot of flooding on the property, as indicated by greater areas of dark blue. “We’ve put choppers in the air during floods, we’ve spent a lot of our own money flying over going and dropping GPS points — but we won’t have to do that now, because Nearmap imagery tells us where the constraints are in the landscape” Jamie Woods, Gayini Land Manager, Nari Nari Tribal Council. Healing Country for future generations When the Nari Nari Tribal Council regained ownership of Gayini in 2019, the main goal was to bring the land back to its near-natural state. Nearmap imagery and AI data is playing a role in helping Jamie Woods and his team achieve targets by providing property-wide data that helps verify the results from traditional management techniques. “We want the veins of this Country to carry the lifeblood, and the only way we can do that naturally is to take out these structures and constraints [irrigation channels and levees], which are brick walls and barriers for water,” said Jamie Woods. We always said that as this Country healed, it healed the people that were involved in it – that’s the big impact story.” Step lightly towards smarter regeneration Remote assessment across large areas can help reach decisions quicker, backed by accurate data. Keen to know more? Get in Touch
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Do more with MapBrowser
more with MapBrowser Do more with MapBrowser Nov 2024 Nov 2024 Play Thanks for all your feedback! We’ve listened and put your suggestions into action with 5 new MapBrowser enhancements to help you get the results you need, faster and more easily. From collaboration to property insights, large-area exports, more than 50 new AI layers, and a new-look MyAccount dashboard, a new way of working in MapBrowser is at your fingertips today. 1. Collaborate and share – put your team on the map “This is a game-changer!” said one of our first customers to use the new real-time collaboration tool in MapBrowser – one of our most requested features. Use the collaboration and sharing tool to share map projects and annotations in real time with others in your organisation. With collaborative editing for up to 20 different users, you can view real-time comments, tag other users, and share or receive notifications by email or in the MapBrowser app. Smarter collaboration Urban planners : collaborate with real-time map updates on city planning projects. Emergency managers : share critical disaster response maps for fast decision-making. Civil engineers and project leads : collaborate instantly with AEC teams on projects and structural changes. Insurance claims adjusters: review property damage and work with a current view. Insurance risk managers : share accurate risk views with underwriters and clients. 2. See property insights in one view The new location list and property panel feature gives you even more information about an address or property at a glance. Simply select a property to see all relevant AI features in one view, and add custom metadata. Your locations will be saved in an easily accessible list helping you see all marked properties for reference, exporting and sharing. Property Insights requires a Nearmap AI subscription for relevant AI values to be populated. Succeed with smarter insights City planners: track property parcel changes, building footprints, surrounding infrastructure and property data. Public works authorities: prioritise maintenance and allocate resources by understanding changes to infrastructure, vegetation, and surface conditions. Architects: design with real-world data and visualise potential obstacles or opportunities. Construction managers: Mark key areas on site maps, track project progress, and view changes over time with AI-powered insights. Commercial real estate: assess project feasibility and make better-informed investment decisions with AI property insights. 3. Save your place(s) with project marker lists Keep a closer eye on your MapBrowser projects in one place with project marker lists showing all your added locations. In each marker list, you can add specific attributes – creating a shareable dataset about any details relating to a particular location or property. You can also filter the marker list, and download the data as a CSV file. (The property details listed in the image above are for illustration purposes only and are not factual.) Streamline your property data Construction managers: Mark key areas on site maps and collate crucial property data in one source. Residential real estate agencies: highlight and share important property features or condition details internally and with clients. Facilities managers: understand key property aspects at a glance, reducing siloed information to improve FM services. 4. Export large-area imagery Now you can export high-resolution 2D vertical aerial imagery in any-shaped polygon of your choice covering areas up to 2,700 square kilometres – more than twice the size of Flinders Island! Previously, large-sized exports of this needed to be requested and processed by our geospatial team, which meant a longer wait for the file to be delivered. This feature puts export capabilities at your fingertips. The ability to select irregularly shaped areas gives you scope to export imagery of areas such as construction sites, roads, campuses, hospitals, suburbs and more. Now, you simply identify your area of interest using the polygon tool, select the desired resolution and size of the imagery, then download and save your large-scale imagery export. 2D export requires 3D export permissions and available export credits. Export at scale Planning teams: export and analyse irregular-shaped areas such as highways or mixed-use development zones. Emergency responders: export specific disaster-zone imagery for quicker assessment and more effective triage. GIS professionals: export areas such as roadways and utility corridors into GIS platforms, without the need to mosaic multiple image tiles. Surveyors: reduce the time needed for field surveys data acquisition by exporting imagery covering any shaped area. 5. Deepen your insights with 50+ new AI features Now, with significantly enhanced machine learning capabilities powering Nearmap Gen 6 AI, you can access a total of more than 130 AI layers to conduct remote inspection and assessments, classify and detect damage, and optimise workflows to enable fast and accurate decision-making AI packs consolidate the AI attributes relevant to specific areas of interest, including Building Structures, Roof Shape and Roof Materials, Pavement Markings, Pavement Condition, Utilities, Yard Objects and more. Please note: AI Layers Library (currently only available as vector layers): A subscription for Nearmap AI and AI packs are required to view raster AI layers. A subscription for Nearmap Advanced AI Viewer is required to view vector AI layers. Enhance risk management Underwriters: gain a deeper understanding of risk factors and changes over time. Quoting : identify crucial property details to pre-fill quotes with accurate data. Loss control: analyse property condition and hazards for proactive loss prevention. Claims: assess damage with greater confidence, detect change and verify repairs remotely. Customer care: engage with agents and policyholders to recommend preventative measures. Along with these updates, you’ll also notice that we’ve updated the dashboard in the MapBrowser MyAccount view. The new grid layout displays your projects in an intuitive layout. Each project tile has an action menu where you can open, duplicate, rename, or archive a project. You will also be able to see who’s currently working on a project, and their access level. Your notifications window in MapBrowser will appear in the top right of the screen, directly under the bell icon. What will you achieve with MapBrowser? We’d love to hear how you’re using these new features. And let us know about any improvements or developments you’d like to see in future – we’re always listening. Take your work to a whole new level in MapBrowser . Login now
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Raising the bar on geospatial AI
See how you can identify 130+ different mapped features at speed and make accurate decisions with Nearmap Gen 6 AI.
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Unlocking the power of AI for comprehensive risk assessment in insurance
The new capabilities in Nearmap Gen 6 AI will allow insurers to more effectively detect, assess, and mitigate risk.
Discover more!
Across the globe, GIS professionals are using Nearmap to advance their understanding of the world. Learn more about how these geospatial experts in commercial, government, and insurance sectors are optimising their efficiencies with our solution.Customer Stories
Go behind the scenes with GIS pioneers to see how they’re using Nearmap.
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