My most popular map ever, Educational Attainment in America, gets a fresh look for 2026:

- Updated to the 2024 ACS
- MapLibre via R's mapgl with built-in interactivity
- OpenFreeMap basemap, Cloudflare-hosted PMTiles (blazing fast!)

Explore your city: personal.tcu.edu/kylewalker/m...

Showed my Advanced GIS students Claude Code this week.

We built this map of code compliance violations in Fort Worth; heatmap giving way to points on zoom.

Used the ArcGIS SDK for JavaScript.

Took 10 minutes.

I believe in Jevons Paradox.

But we need to be teaching skills for 2026, not for 2016.

Quality-of-life improvements to the #rstats {geosam} package:

- Interactive swatches let you customize extraction color in the explorer;
- The explorer sidebar is now collapsible;
- The package installs the stable version of HuggingFace Transformers

walker-data.com/geosam

Distributed energy is harder to map than centralized infrastructure, but cutting-edge AI tools can help.

Shown: identifying rooftop solar panels in a suburban neighborhood with Mapbox imagery, Meta's SAM3.

Useful for utilities, grid planners, and solar prospecting.

Mapped every pipeline in Texas: 368,000 miles of infrastructure at your fingertips.

For energy operators, midstream companies, and data center site selectors, understanding pipeline proximity matters.

Open data + modern GIS makes it accessible.

It's 2024 5-year American Community Survey release day!

The ACS is the best resource for small-area analysis of US demographics.

In R, use tidycensus and mapgl to dive into the data right now.

Copy-paste the code below for an interactive income map with a legend filter:

Nearly 18 million California jobs in 2023, visualized by 2-digit NAICS category with block-level precision.

Open data and modern geospatial technology make powerful labor market analytics possible.

Identifying possible empty lots in Fort Worth's South Main district with Meta's Segment Anything Model 3.

Draw an "exemplar" prompt, find similar areas in the satellite image. Useful for urban redevelopment, real estate, and more.

Try out {geosam}: walker-data.com/geosam

spopt for R implements the Max-P-compact regions algorithm. Draw contiguous regions that optimize both for attribute similarity and compactness.

Shown here: regular Max-P with queen weights (left), Max-P-compact with rook weights (right)

Learn more: walker-data.com/spopt-r/arti...

Nearly 1500 swimming pools found across a 10 square kilometer suburban area, all from a single text prompt.

Meta's SAM3 and Mapbox imagery combine for incredible zero-shot geospatial intelligence.

It didn't make it into the CRAN release, but I've just implemented draggable legends in the dev version of {mapgl}.

It's quite useful when the legend is getting in the way of your analysis!

#rstats

New post: learn how to use the new interactive legends and screenshot control in R's mapgl package.

These features are great for interactive demos and visualizing custom scenarios without Shiny.

The new release (v0.4.4) is on CRAN now, so go get it!

walker-data.com/posts/mapgl-...

In the latest mapgl release: a native screenshot control.

Workflow: spin up a quick map; use the new interactive legend to filter your data; drag a marker; take a screenshot; share with colleagues.

Uses html2canvas internally to capture the exact state of your map view.

#rstats

Here's how the new interactive categorical legends in {mapgl} work.

Click a category in the legend to turn the corresponding features on/off on the map.

Not groundbreaking, but you get this out of the box with one argument.

It used to take me forever to code this manually!

Since I started developing the mapgl R package I've envisioned built-in interactive legends.

They're finally here in the upcoming package release: a filter slider for continuous legends, and click-to-filter for categorical legends.

Blog post coming this week!