NGIS 2026: Cloud-Native GIS with GeoLibre¶
Building Modern Geospatial Workflows, a full-day preconference workshop at the Nevada Geographic Information Society (NGIS) 2026 conference.
| Date | Tuesday, November 17, 2026, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. |
| Location | MIKC 221 "Knowledge Nook", Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center (second floor), University of Nevada, Reno |
| Instructor | Dr. Qiusheng Wu, University of Tennessee, Knoxville |
| Format | Eight one-hour sections: about 50 minutes of lecture and hands-on exercises, then a 10-minute break |
| What to bring | A laptop with an up-to-date Chrome, Edge, or Firefox. No installation is required |
GeoLibre is a free and open-source, cloud-native GIS platform for visualizing, analyzing, and sharing geospatial data. It runs entirely in a web browser at web.geolibre.app, and the same app ships as a desktop application. In this workshop you will use it to read cloud-hosted data in place, without downloading or converting it first, and to build maps that anyone can reopen from a single link.
Schedule¶
| Time | Section | Topics |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00 - 9:00 | 1. Introduction to GeoLibre and cloud-native GIS | The cloud-native ecosystem, the GeoLibre interface, your first map, projects |
| 9:00 - 10:00 | 2. Accessing cloud-hosted vector data | Loading data by URL, CSV points, styling, labels, legends, the attribute table |
| 10:00 - 11:00 | 3. Cloud-native formats: COG, GeoParquet, PMTiles, and Zarr | How each format reads only the bytes it needs, and when to use which |
| 11:00 - 12:00 | 4. STAC catalogs and OGC web services | Searching Sentinel-2 with STAC, WMS, OGC API - Features |
| 12:00 - 1:00 | Lunch | |
| 1:00 - 2:00 | 5. Spatial analysis with SQL and processing tools | DuckDB spatial SQL, spatial joins, buffers, terrain analysis |
| 2:00 - 3:00 | 6. LiDAR, terrain, and 3D | Streaming USGS 3DEP point clouds, 3D terrain, camera control |
| 3:00 - 4:00 | 7. Extending GeoLibre with plugins and AI | Time slider, historical imagery, web-service catalogs, the AI Assistant |
| 4:00 - 5:00 | 8. Sharing maps and reproducible projects | Story maps, share links, embedding, HTML export, the Python package, wrap-up |
Each section page lists its learning goals, a lecture outline, step-by-step exercises, and a link to the finished project so you can check your work or catch up after a break.
Before you start¶
- Open web.geolibre.app in Chrome, Edge, or Firefox. If a welcome wizard appears, close it. Everything in this workshop runs in the browser. Your data leaves your machine only when you share or export it, or when you use the AI Assistant with a remote provider. Place searches go to a geocoding service, and catalog searches send the map extent to the catalog.
- Optional: install the desktop app. It adds local file access and a Python sidecar for extra processing tools, but no exercise requires it.
- Optional, for Section 8: a free account at share.geolibre.app if you want to publish a public link to your map.
- Optional, for Section 7: an API key for an AI provider (Google Gemini, Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter), or a local Ollama install, if you want to try the AI Assistant yourself.
Falling behind is fine
Every section ends with an Open the finished project link. It opens the exact map the exercise builds, so you can pick up the next section from a clean state at any time.
Workshop data¶
The core workshop data is real, public-domain data for the Reno, Lake Tahoe,
and Nevada area, with national county and state layers for comparison, hosted
as plain files on https://assets.geolibre.app/data/workshops/ngis-2026/. You
never need to download it: every exercise reads it by URL. Some exercises
also read public services on other hosts (listed below the table), so make
sure the venue network does not block them.
| Dataset | File | Format | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nevada counties (17) | nv_counties.geojson |
GeoJSON | US Census Bureau, 2023 cartographic boundaries |
| US states (56) | us_states.geojson |
GeoJSON | US Census Bureau |
| US counties (3,235) | us_counties.fgb, .parquet, .pmtiles |
FlatGeobuf, GeoParquet, PMTiles | US Census Bureau |
| Earthquakes, M2.5+, 2016-2025 (8,031) | nv_earthquakes.csv, .parquet |
CSV, GeoParquet | USGS ANSS Comprehensive Catalog |
| Reno-Tahoe elevation | reno_tahoe_dem.tif |
Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF, about 30 m | USGS 3DEP 1/3 arc-second DEM, resampled |
| Reno-Tahoe hillshade | reno_tahoe_hillshade.tif |
Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF | Derived from the DEM |
| Reno-Tahoe landmarks (8) | reno_sites.geojson |
GeoJSON | Hand-digitized, approximate locations |
The earthquake extract covers latitude 35 to 42.1 and longitude -120.1 to -114, so it includes events just outside Nevada, mostly in eastern California. Section 5 clips it to Nevada with a spatial join.
Other sections also read large public datasets in place: Sentinel-2 imagery from Earth Search, the USGS National Map and Water Data services, NOAA sea surface temperature as Zarr, and the USGS 3DEP Reno-Carson LiDAR point cloud.
Finished projects¶
Each link opens the project a section builds, straight in the browser.
| Section | Project file |
|---|---|
| 1. Introduction | Open in GeoLibre · 01-first-map.geolibre.json |
| 2. Vector data | Open in GeoLibre · 02-vector-styling.geolibre.json |
| 3. Cloud-native formats | Open in GeoLibre · 03-cloud-formats.geolibre.json |
| 4. STAC and OGC services | Open in GeoLibre · 04-stac-services.geolibre.json |
| 5. Spatial analysis | Open in GeoLibre · 05-spatial-analysis.geolibre.json |
| 6. LiDAR and 3D | Open in GeoLibre · 06-lidar-3d.geolibre.json |
| 7. Plugins and AI | Open in GeoLibre · 07-plugins-ai.geolibre.json |
| 8. Sharing | Open in GeoLibre · 08-story-map.geolibre.json |
Conventions in these pages¶
- Menu paths are written as Add data → Vector layer: open the Add data menu in the top toolbar, then choose Vector layer.
- Layer actions is the ⋯ button on a layer's row in the Layers panel.
- The Style panel is on the right. Click the palette icon on a layer row to open it for that layer.
- Labels follow the current web app. If a label moves in a later release, the User Guide has the up-to-date reference.