GeoNadir

11/06/2026

It's that time again! We're off for another week in the field today, and hoping that the weather goddesses play nice! This is part of our project with Griffith University JCU: James Cook University, Australia, and Macquarie University to assess corral bleaching and recovery on Lizard Island. We've selected this week as the tides are super low, so it makes it a lot easier to assess the corals from our aerial drones. Stay tuned for some spectacular imagery!

11/06/2026

Small quality of life updates can make a big difference to daily organisation :)

09/06/2026

Most mining rehabilitation programs are assessed once a year. An ecologist goes out for a week, walks transects, records species, characterises what they find. Those data go into a report and become the official record of how rehabilitation is tracking.

The problem isn't that ecologists don't know what they're doing. The problem is that one week out of 52 is a very thin slice of evidence to base a compliance decision on. The week they visit, the site might be coming out of a dry spell, or it might be unusually green after good rain. What the report captures is that particular moment, not the trajectory of the site over the year.

There's also a spatial scale problem. Sites that are being actively rehabilitated can run to hundreds of hectares. An ecologist in the field can only characterise samples of that - which is standard practice and well understood, but it means there are large areas of each site that aren't being directly observed in any given year.

None of this is a criticism of the way things have been done in the past. It was the best available method. The question worth asking now, is whether the constraints that made it the best available method still apply today?

09/04/2026

Here's something we've noticed: when rehabilitation monitoring starts with "can we see the weeds," it often ends in the wrong place.

Not because seeing weeds isn't useful. It is - in the right context, at the right scale. But mine rehabilitation isn't precision agriculture. It operates at different spatial and temporal scales, with different regulatory objectives.

Confidence doesn't come from knowing exactly what's present in one place at one moment. It comes from understanding how systems are behaving through time. That's a harder question to deal with. And it requires rethinking what evidence actually defends your program.

We've been exploring this for a few months. Here's how we are changing our mindset:

In almost every conversation about remote sensing for mine rehabilitation, “seeing weeds” quickly becomes the focal point. "Can I see the weeds?" "Can I count the weeds?" "Which species are there?" These sound like reasonable questions. But rather than take them at face value, I see them as shor...

08/04/2026

Creating a slope layer from drone mapping data is not difficult. And a lot of workflows stop there. But the layer is only part of the story. Someone still has to interpret what it means, where the real risks are, and what should happen next. That interpretation step carries a lot of cognitive load, especially when the decisions need to stand up in a compliance context.

Recently, we've been spending a lot of time moving beyond that. Treating the layer as evidence, not the end point, and focusing instead on identifying where slope exceeds thresholds and which areas actually need attention.

The aim is to move from data to something you can act on, without needing to understand every step behind the scenes.

This is one of several workflows we're building behind the scenes at GeoNadir. They run on enterprise client data now. They'll ship to the broader user base later.

03/04/2026

Friday : These data are largely unusable.

In terrestrial drone mapping, flying close to midday is often recommended because the high sun angle reduces shadows and makes vegetation easier to interpret. It is a piece of advice that works well for many land-based surveys.

But marine environments behave very differently. When the sun is high, specular reflection from the water surface can produce intense sun glint (or glitter). Instead of seeing the seabed or benthic habitats, the sensor captures reflected sunlight. In nadir mapping workflows this effect is largely controlled by the sun–water–sensor geometry, which means flight direction or camera settings do very little to solve the problem.

Unless you have diffuse lighting from thick cloud cover, a high sun angle can render large parts of marine imagery unusable. It is a good reminder that drone mapping practices developed for land do not automatically transfer to water. The upshot - don't map near midday :)

02/04/2026

Tiny tip to enhance your quality of life :) One of the quiet challenges in working with spatial data is simply seeing enough of it at once. When your table of contents is constrained, you end up scrolling, collapsing layers, or constantly adjusting your view just to understand what's in your project.

Being able to resize the table of contents sounds like a minor interface change, but it gives you much more control over how you work. You can expand it when you need to explore your data structure, and minimise it when you want to focus on the map.

We think that good workflows are not just about powerful tools, but also about reducing the small interruptions that break your flow.

01/04/2026

Most coastal monitoring still starts with looking at images and asking “does this beach look different?” It is a useful starting point, but it only tells part of the story.

With drone mapping, the real value comes from moving beyond visual comparison and actually measuring change. That might be tracking shifts in elevation, extracting beach profiles, calculating sediment volumes, or quantifying how vegetation is responding over time. In many cases, the most important changes are not obvious in imagery alone.

We recently pulled together ten different ways to assess coastal erosion using drone data. What they all have in common is that they move from observation to evidence. Instead of saying a beach has changed, you can show how much, where, and in what way.

That shift is what makes the data useful for decision making, whether that is managing erosion risk, planning interventions, or understanding how a system is evolving.

Read on here:

Coastal environments are in constant flux, influenced by tides, storms, and human activity. Understanding these changes is critical for managing coastal erosion, assessing storm impacts, and informing conservation efforts. Drone mapping provides a powerful way to track these changes with high spatia...

31/03/2026

A lot of time in geospatial workflows is not just spent analysing data. Getting the data into the system in the first place can be a massive hurdle.

Uploading vector data in different projections, reprojecting it beforehand, clicking through import menus. None of it is difficult, but it adds friction to every project. Especially if you don't know the projection.

Being able to drag and drop vector files directly onto the map, regardless of their projection, removes a surprising amount of that friction. It turns what used to be a series of steps into something almost immediate.

Small improvements like this do not change what you can do. They change how quickly you can get to the point where the work actually starts.

Feel free to drag your GeoJSON, KML, CSV, GPX, and SHP files - in any projection - directly into your GeoNadir project!

30/03/2026

If you’ve ever worked on a project with multiple datasets, you’ll know how quickly the table of contents can become super messy and out of control.

Not because the data are complex, but because everything ends up sitting in one long list.

Being able to group layers, and then group those groups again, sounds like a small change. But it makes a big difference to how you organise and navigate your data. Instead of scrolling and searching, you can structure your project in a way that actually reflects how you think about it.

When you are working across multiple sites, time periods, or data types, that clarity becomes essential. It is not just about keeping things tidy. It is about being able to find what you need quickly and stay focused on the analysis rather than the interface.