Ian Schuler is the CEO of Development Seed — the team behind a lot of the open source tooling that quietly holds up the geospatial world. He's been at the helm for over a decade, and in this conversation, we dig into what he calls the great retooling: the idea that cloud-native geospatial is about to flip from an emerging pattern to the dominant one, and that AI is the thing tipping it over the edge.

The argument is simple — agents want to discover your data, query it, transform it, and hand back an answer. If your data isn't in a format they can reach, you're simply not part of the conversation anymore.

A really enjoyable one. I hope you get as much out of it as I did.

Register for the forum 👉 https://2026.cloudnativegeo.org

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This episode is sponsored by the Cloud Native Geospatial Forum. The CNG Forum 2026 runs October 6–9 at Snowbird, Utah — three days of real-world cloud-native geospatial (STAC, COGs, GeoParquet, Zarr, and more) with the teams actually building this stuff at scale, plus a hands-on workshop day to kick things off. Register at https://2026.cloudnativegeo.org

What is Earth observation, really — and why, after fifty years of satellite imagery, is it still not "mainstream"?

In this episode, I'm joined by Aravind Ravichandran, founder of TerraWatch, an independent research and advisory firm focused entirely on Earth observation. Aravind writes the TerraWatch newsletter, runs the EO Summit, and spends his time thinking about the strategy and economics of the industry more deeply than just about anyone.

We start with a deceptively simple question — is Earth observation even an industry? — and end up somewhere more interesting: Aravind's argument that when the technology truly succeeds, it becomes invisible, quietly embedded in agriculture, insurance, energy, and defense the same way weather satellites already are.

Along the way, we get into:

• Why 60+ countries are now building their own satellite constellations, and whether they'll still exist in five years
• What Planet restricting imagery access really means — and why Aravind thinks they were "punished for doing something progressive"
• The technology is actually moving the needle: hyperspectral data going free, AI foundation models, edge computing on satellites, and inter-satellite laser links
• Which use cases are genuinely picking up (utilities, parametric insurance) — and which were always hype (counting cars in parking lots)
• The defense paradox: how the industry that built Earth observation may also be the biggest thing holding back its commercial future

Some open questions we sit with: If satellite data is critical infrastructure, what happens when someone turns it off?

Should high-resolution imagery of the whole world be open — and what are the privacy and security costs if it is? And can sixty countries ever pool their data, or will sovereignty always trump logic?

Ryan Shields has one of the most interesting careers in geospatial — from remote sensing for conservation in the Caribbean, to disaster response data engineering with FEMA, to his current role turning spatial data into animation assets for Johnny Harris's YouTube channel at New Press.

In this episode, Ryan counts down the 10 tools he's using right now to tell map stories that reach millions of viewers. We cover Felt, PostGIS on Crunchy Bridge, Geo Layers 3 for After Effects, CShapes for historical borders, Natural Earth, MapTiler, Mapshaper, the new GDAL pipeline syntax, GRASS GIS, and how he's stitching it all together with Claude Code and VS Code.

Along the way we get into how LLMs are changing geospatial workflows, why command-line tools are well-suited to AI agents, the limits of de facto vs de jure borders in historical datasets, and how better tooling is making data journalism viable for small communities that newsrooms usually overlook.

Whether you're a cartographer, data engineer, journalist, or just map-curious, this one is packed with links worth chasing.

• Felt — https://felt.com
• PostGIS — https://postgis.net
• Crunchy Bridge — https://www.crunchybridge.com
• Geo Layers 3 (After Effects extension) — https://aescripts.com/geolayers/ ⚠️ verify
• CShapes (historical borders dataset) — https://icr.ethz.ch/data/cshapes/ ⚠️ verify
• Open Historical Map — https://www.openhistoricalmap.org
• Natural Earth — https://www.naturalearthdata.com
• Eduard (Swiss-style hillshading app) — https://www.eduard.earth ⚠️ verify
• Shaded Relief (Tom Patterson) — https://www.shadedrelief.com
• MapTiler — https://www.maptiler.com
• MapTiler Engine — https://www.maptiler.com/engine/
• EPSG.io — https://epsg.io
• Mapshaper — https://mapshaper.org
• GDAL — https://gdal.org
• GRASS GIS — https://grass.osgeo.org
• QGIS — https://qgis.org
• DBeaver — https://dbeaver.io
• Claude Code — https://claude.com/claude-code ⚠️ verify
• VS Code — https://code.visualstudio.com
• Geodata Viewer (VS Code extension) — search "Geodata Viewer" in the VS Code marketplace
• PAI – Personal AI Infrastructure (Daniel Miessler) — https://github.com/danielmiessler ⚠️ verify exact repo
• Deep State Map (Ukraine conflict) — https://deepstatemap.live
• Johnny Harris (YouTube) — https://www.youtube.com/@johnnyharris

• Quick Map Tools — https://quickmaptools.com
• Hunting NZ — https://huntingnz.com
• NZ Elevation Tools — https://nzelevationtools.com
• Smart Query Tools — https://smartquerytools.com