Development Seed

Nearly 90% of global fisheries are fully exploited or overexploited. At the same time, fish consumption has quadrupled in 50 years. To manage oceans sustainably, we need to understand where fish actually live, not just where they’re caught. That’s the goal of the Global Fish Tracking System (GFTS), built with Ifremer and Simula Research Laboratory as part of the European Commission’s Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative. Using biologging sensors, climate projections, and open‐source modeling, GFTS reconstructs where fish travel throughout the year. We then translate those complex patterns into an interactive tool that helps scientists and policymakers identify spawning grounds, feeding areas, and migration corridors, and see how they may shift as the ocean warms. This work is open source and generalizable. It’s a model for how science, engineering, and policy can come together to protect marine ecosystems. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/g78myMnp 🧡 Follow Development Seed for more stories on how technology is advancing how scientists can access and use data for better decision-making.

Development Seed is on the ground at the Overture Maps Foundation Member Summit in Florence, Italy this week (April 21–23)! We’re excited to join the community pushing the boundaries of open, interoperable geospatial data, and to share some of the work we’ve been building to support the future of Overture Maps. On Wednesday, April 22 at 14:40 CEST, Sajjad Anwar will present “Agents for Places Data Evaluation.” Sajjad will walk through our ongoing efforts to develop a toolkit that uses agents and LLMs to rapidly evaluate places data sources, from scraping and transforming heterogeneous datasets into the Overture places schema, to running heuristic‐based QA and comparisons. The goal: help partners quickly understand whether a dataset is viable for ingestion into Overture places. This approach blends deterministic tools, structured instructions, and model‐driven evaluation to make places data assessment faster, more transparent, and more scalable across the ecosystem. We’re also glad to have Kevin Bullock attending the summit and connecting with partners across the Overture community. If you’re in Florence for the event, come say hello! We’d love to talk about open tooling, data quality, and the future of Overture Maps and places.

Development Seed turns 23 today 🧡 We don’t tend to make a big deal about anniversaries, but it’s a good moment to reflect on the people, partnerships, and work that continue to shape what we do. This past year held a lot of change. We said goodbye to our DC office after more than a decade, closing a chapter that meant a lot to our team and community. At the same time, we kept building in ways that feel consistent with who we are. We launched Global Nature Watch with partners at the Land & Carbon Lab - World Resources Institute and the Bezos Earth Fund, making it easier to explore and ask questions of environmental data. We continued our work with NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration, including being on the ground in India for the launch of the NISAR satellite. We showed up at European Space Agency - ESA Living Planet Symposium with a Sentinel-2 collaborative LEGO mosaic set that sparked more conversations than we expected and even a visit from Simonetta Cheli. And we welcomed new teammates who are already shaping how we think and build. Across all of it, the focus hasn’t really changed: shorten the distance between data and decision. A lot of what we’re most proud of doesn’t make it to the headlines. It’s the quiet, steady work of supporting open tools and standards, working closely with partners, and finding better ways to make complex data usable. We’re grateful to everyone we’ve had the chance to work with over the years, across partners, collaborators, and teammates, past and present. 23 years in, and there's still a lot we’re curious about. 🧡 Follow Development Seed to keep up with what we’re building and learning.

We're looking forward to connecting with folks at FedGeoDay this week! Keep an eye out for Lane Goodman and Leo Thomas, who are excited to answer all your questions about GeoAI, Agents, thoughtful applications, and UI/UX in this rapidly evolving landscape. If you'd like to chat, send them a message here on LinkedIn. Want to know more about what Leo & Lane have worked on? Here's a few recent blog posts: Distilling climate science for decision making in Vanuatu https://lnkd.in/gCA8vJJe Building Our Own LLM Assistant https://lnkd.in/ge7gC2TN Taking a Deep Dive in User Research https://lnkd.in/ggfVWshB

🟠 Meet our #FOSS4GE2026 Bronze Sponsor 🟠 Development Seed is a geospatial technology team that builds open tools and cloud systems to make Earth data accessible and usable. We partner with organizations like NASA, ESA, and World Resources Institute to turn complex data into insights for climate, disaster response, and decision-making. 👏 Thank you, Development Seed, for supporting FOSS4G Europe 2026 and the open geospatial ecosystem. See you in Timișoara! 👉 Check the company and more on their website: www.developmentseed.org ◼️  More on our #FOSS4GE2026 Sponsors: https://lnkd.in/eQbYU7mu 🤲  Sponsoring events like FOSS4G Europe 2026 Timișoara can be a great opportunity for ongoing investment in the community. If you're interested in joining us, check our sponsorship call at: https://lnkd.in/eAwtV5pu

🎉📢🛰️🌲Our new paper on GEDI + ICESat-2 global and boreal 2020 biomass estimates is *finally* online!! 🌲🛰️📢🎉 https://lnkd.in/g7mfkf8j This paper was a journey. We started it seven years ago as a way to ‘simply’ fill GEDI’s northern data gap with our sister satellite ICESat-2 - many years, many product iterations, many discussions on uncertainty estimation, and the paper is finally online! On a personal note this was also the paper I ‘had to submit’ before giving birth to my son - who just turned 3! Sometimes big efforts take a lot of time. But I hope the time has paid off; we are very confident in this paper and underlying products. We are also fully transparent (all open code!) and the work continues to make this better in the years to come. I am also filled with gratitude for the most wonderful and supportive authorship team. Keeping a paper alive and relevant for this long is a big lift. And to the NASA MAAP team for sooooo much computational support! And of course thank you for funding from NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration 🛰️❤️🌲 What did we find? 🌲🌳🌎 2020 Aboveground biomass: 593 Pg 🌲Boreal (but what IS boreal?) : 73 Pg ICESat-2 works well in most boreal forests, but where trees are tall and you are south of 52 latitude, use GEDI. Models, as always, remain constrained by the availability of quality reference data. Looking to #GEOTREES to make these better in future.

Happening next week! Join us in Lisbon for some social time during the Geoawesome - The Next Geo - 15th anniversary week. RSVP link below 👇

Not gonna lie. This is a big deal for us. I'm honored to continue to support the inspiring work of the NASA ODSI team and their leadership in open science on the cloud, cloud native geo formats and applications, and accelerating AI across earth and space science. And you can be part of it! We've put together an amazing team that includes from Development Seed, 2i2c, Left Right Mind, and Spatial Informatics Group, LLC. We are currently hiring for a key technical leadership role that will shape this work directly with the team in Huntsville. (link in comments)