Software Development Engineer 1

Razor-sharp 3D aerial imagery of the Netherlands is now available in ArcGIS. April 23, 2026 Esri and Kavel 10, a provider of high-quality Lidar data and aerial imagery, have launched a new premium 3D data bundle offering highly detailed and realistic spatial coverage of the Netherlands. Updated annually, the dataset captures aerial imagery at a resolution fine enough to distinguish small objects such as manhole covers and traffic signs, giving organizations direct access to current, reliable spatial information within ArcGIS. By making high-quality 3D data more accessible, the two parties aim to lower the barrier to adoption for organizations working on challenges related to the energy transition, climate adaptation, and the design and redesign of public space. Demand for accurate, accessible and immediately actionable 3D spatial data is growing fast, particularly among organizations in construction, infrastructure, utilities and government. The ability to quickly understand existing conditions and build a clear, defensible rationale for key decisions is becoming a baseline requirement, not a differentiator. A new 3D data bundle from Esri and Kavel 10 combines two complementary strengths to address this directly. Kavel 10 - which flies its own aircraft across the entirety of the Netherlands every year, producing a complete, high-quality and uniformly consistent national 3D dataset - brings the raw material. Esri Nederland brings the platform: ArcGIS technology that turns that data into something organizations can act on. Together, they shorten the path from spatial data to informed decision-making, particularly in projects with significant spatial impact. Manhole covers and traffic signs. Kavel 10's high-resolution cameras capture detail down to three centimetres, making even small objects such as manhole covers and traffic signs clearly visible. That level of precision makes the data genuinely useful for comparing existing conditions against design or planning scenarios. In other words, the new dataset is built for the decisions that matter. It targets some of the most pressing challenges facing urban planners, engineers and policymakers today: the energy transition, climate adaptation and the redesign of public space. A designer can use the data to identify fine elements such as cables, pipes or fencing within their spatial context. A policymaker can rapidly assess the implications of an intervention - whether a flood defence upgrade or a public space redesign - on the surrounding environment. Across the board, the bundle supports the full workflow: planning, designing, substantiating choices, communicating with stakeholders and monitoring outcomes over time. Lowering the barrier to data access. By handling both data acquisition and processing, Esri and Kavel 10 eliminate the technical burden on end users, giving organizations immediate access to data they can apply in practice. The two partners describe it as a new standard for spatial insight and analytical accuracy. "The razor-sharp 3D visualizations are easier and faster to process, and provide an even sharper and more complete picture of areas and specific locations across the Netherlands. This is an important step in the development of 3D data in the Netherlands," said Thomas Lier, product manager at Esri Nederland. "By making this high-quality data accessible, we lower the barrier for organizations to work with it." Gaussian splatting. Gaussian splatting, one of the most talked-about techniques in geospatial right now, sits at the heart of this new data product. Unlike traditional mesh-based rendering, Gaussian splatting produces strikingly realistic visualizations with significantly greater efficiency. For organizations that need their spatial data to be both visually compelling and technically rigorous, that combination is hard to ignore. Integrated with the analytical capabilities of ArcGIS, it gives teams a powerful way to explain, test and substantiate designs and plans in a format that stakeholders can actually engage with. The benefits extend across digital twins, 3D modelling, and visualization for infrastructure and energy transition projects, among others. Per project or per area. The bundle is available now and can be accessed on a per-project or per-area basis. Data is delivered through Esri Nederland's own infrastructure, meaning organizations need no additional storage or server capacity of their own. The product will continue to evolve, with Esri Nederland committed to developing the dataset further based on real-world experience and emerging market needs. Value staying current with geomatics? Stay on the map with its expertly curated newsletters. Gim International provide educational insights, industry updates, and inspiring stories to help you learn, grow, and reach your full potential in your field. Don't miss out - subscribe today and ensure you're always informed, educated, and inspired.

How UNESCO monitors 1,248 World Heritage Sites in near real time. The UNESCO World Heritage List protects 1,248 places across 170 countries. Machu Picchu. The Great Barrier Reef. Cologne Cathedral. The Lavaux vineyard terraces. Places so different in climate, geography, and cultural context that a single management approach simply cannot work. And yet the threats to those sites (wildfires, earthquakes, floods, coral bleaching, deforestation) do not respect the boundaries that separate Cultural from Natural sites, or one country's jurisdiction from another's. So how do you keep watch over 1,248 properties with one small team? That was the question UNESCO was solving when they partnered with Esri and with Mapular, an Esri Germany partner, to extend the UNESCO Sites Navigator into a living monitoring platform. The opportunity: global scale, local consequences. World Heritage inscription happens once. Protecting a site happens every day. New hazard datasets become available every year, from higher-resolution satellite feeds to real-time disaster networks like USGS, GDACS, NASA FIRMS, NOAA, and Global Forest Watch. Each of them is useful on its own. The value multiplies when they come together in one place, aligned to the same site geometries, at the same cadence, inside a platform a conservation team can navigate without writing code. That is the opportunity the Sites Navigator was built to capture. Three constraints shaped the brief: * Global coverage, site-level precision. A wildfire near a natural site is not the same as a wildfire near a stone monument. The system must reflect that. * Low-code maintainability. UNESCO's GIS team are conservation and heritage specialists first. They needed a platform their existing staff could own and extend, without developing. * Transparent science. Alerts had to be explainable: why did this site flag, what data did it come from, what threshold was crossed? Over-alerting erodes the credibility of the platform itself. The solution: the UNESCO Sites Navigator, extended. UNESCO and Esri had already built the foundation of the Sites Navigator: a unified map pulling World Heritage Sites, Biosphere Reserves, and Global Geoparks into a single interactive view. Mapular joined to build the environmental risk and alert engine: the part that turns the map from a reference tool into a daily operational instrument. Three pieces came together: * A harmonized sites layer that resolves point-based and polygon-based site records into one consistent geometry set. * An automated alert system that runs scheduled analyses against live hazard feeds and flags each site when attention is warranted. * A dedicated monitoring dashboard and advanced map application built on Esri's out-of-the-box tools so UNESCO's team can maintain everything themselves. From raw hazard feeds to actionable alerts. The alert engine ingests from the organizations whose job it is to watch the planet: * NASA FIRMS for active fires * USGS for earthquakes * GDACS (the UN/European Commission joint system) for tsunami advisories * NOAA Coral Reef Watch for coral bleaching conditions * Global Forest Watch for vegetation disturbance and tree cover loss * WRI Aqueduct for water risk, flood risk, drought, and water stress Each feed is interpreted through thresholds UNESCO's scientific team defined. The system does not guess. Events below the defined severity are ignored. Events above it, within a relevant distance of a site, become an alert. The principle is simple and important: the system flags situations that warrant attention. UNESCO's team, with local context and scientific expertise, decides what to do with them. Why ecological relevance matters. Not every hazard threatens every site in the same way. Coral bleaching is a catastrophe for the Great Barrier Reef and irrelevant for the Cologne Cathedral. So the platform only evaluates bleaching for Natural and Mixed sites. A wildfire close to a stone monument is a structural risk for the monument itself. A wildfire at a similar distance from a forest reserve is a risk to the ecosystem that defines the reserve's value. The platform reflects that difference by applying the appropriate buffer distance for each site category. Decisions like these were not implementation details. They were design choices that turned a generic spatial analysis into a tool that makes sense to conservation scientists. Early warning in practice. On a quiet Tuesday, the notebook runs at its scheduled time. It pulls that day's earthquake list from USGS, fires from NASA FIRMS, and tsunami advisories from GDACS. It determines how far each event could reasonably affect a site and runs a server-side spatial filter against the harmonized sites layer. If any site is affected, its alert flag flips to Yes in the production layer. The monitoring dashboard updates automatically. An email goes out to the UNESCO team, grouped by hazard type, with site names and the specific conditions that triggered the alert. On a noisy Tuesday (a Pacific tsunami warning, a fire season in the Mediterranean, a coral bleaching event in the Caribbean at the same time) the same engine runs. The pattern is the same. The value scales. Why out-of-the-box was non-negotiable. This is the part that matters most for other nonprofits thinking about similar investments. Everything Mapular built sits on Esri's standard platform: ArcGIS Online for hosting, ArcGIS Experience Builder for the web application, ArcGIS Dashboards for monitoring, ArcGIS Notebooks for the scheduled automation, Arcade for pop-up logic. No custom backend. No bespoke front-end framework. No services that only one vendor can keep alive. That matters because nonprofit technology that depends on a specific consulting relationship is fragile. The moment the contract ends or the consultant leaves, the system freezes. UNESCO insisted from day one that everything be maintainable by their in-house GIS team. That constraint shaped every architectural decision. Lessons for other nonprofits. A few patterns from this engagement translate directly to other global nonprofit monitoring programs: * Design for team autonomy, not for the consultant. Out-of-the-box tools are slower to customize than bespoke code, but they last longer and cost less over the decade that matters. * Let scientific expertise drive thresholds, not software defaults. The value of an alert is a function of the thresholds behind it. Generic "anomaly detection" is not useful for conservation work. * Separate the hazard from the interpretation. The platform flags. The humans decide. This keeps trust intact over time, even as data sources change. * Harmonize your entities first, then layer analytics on top. The hardest part of the UNESCO engagement was not the alerting logic, it was producing one consistent geometry layer for every site. Analytics are only as good as the spatial foundation beneath them. Built to grow with the mission. The Sites Navigator was designed to keep evolving alongside UNESCO's wider conservation work. The same foundations that power monitoring of World Heritage Sites today can be extended to other UNESCO designations such as Biosphere Reserves and Global Geoparks, as well as to new data sources as they become available. That flexibility, more than any single alert, is the outcome Mapular is most proud of. Looking to build something similar? Mapular helps nonprofit and conservation organizations plan, build, and maintain monitoring platforms on the ArcGIS ecosystem. If you are thinking about an early-warning system for your own program, Mapular would love to hear what you are protecting and how Mapular can help. Ready to put location intelligence to work? Book a free demo and see Mapular in action.