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Matt Ball

@spatialsustain.bsky.social
452 followers 349 following 127 posts

Writer/editor at Esri, relating innovation in the real world to the power of GIS. I edit Esri Blog—Better vision. Better world. #Sustainability

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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
In North Carolina, a regional food bank and a local effort in New Hanover County are working the same problem from two directions: closing the gap for residents facing affordability challenges, using GIS to map people in need and deliver services to them. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
North Carolina Food Banks Map Food Deserts to Meet Rising Need
New Hanover County and the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina’s larger network are mapping to find gaps and gathering more data to display need, capacity, and impact at a glance, region by region, updated as fast as the data comes in.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
During the World Cup, LA County's Dept of Public Health swapped static PDFs for live GIS maps to keep eyes on health conditions like heat, air quality, and disease venue by venue. Now that system is the blueprint for LA28. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
LA County Puts Public Health on a Map for the FIFA World Cup and LA28
LA County Public Health used GIS to build a near real-time situation report for the World Cup, tracking heat, air quality, and disease risk.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Fairfax County Fire and Rescue responded to a gas explosion near a main line, quickly shifting from sketches to drones and a shared 3D view of the neighborhood, live gas readings from nearby homes, and fast evacuations of everyone affected. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
How Real-Time Maps Transformed a Gas Explosion Response
Fairfax County Fire & Rescue used real-time GIS to guide a 12-day gas explosion response—mapping methane readings, tracking evacuations, and processing drone imagery.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
How flood inundation mapping went from a research idea to an advance-warning tool that's now saving lives. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
From Mapping to Prediction: Seeing the Flood Before It Arrives
How a terrain model and a decade of hydrologic science became a real-time flood map that alerts the whole US to disaster.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
A GIS-based crisis management system designed and run by the Lebanese people who understand the terrain, the population, and the politics has outlasted any individual external response, and gotten better over time. It makes the next emergency easier to face. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
Tracking A Million Displaced People in Real Time: Lebanon’s Crisis Coordination System
Lebanon built a crisis coordination system by positioning it as a transparent bridge between government, UN agencies, and communities.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Alaska's constitution says its natural resources belong to the people, so when the state explored the opportunity of opening its subsurface geology for carbon storage, it turned to GIS to create a public data sharing system. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
Alaska Opens Its Geology to the World’s Next Energy Economy
Oil out, carbon back: Alaska's new hub puts the state's public well data to work, mapping a circular path for the next energy economy.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Last year Hurricane Helene knocked out water for 54 days in parts of North Carolina. The National Weather Service forecast was right but the cascading failures weren't visible. NOAA, MITRE & Esri paired a knowledge graph with GIS to trace connections on a live map. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
Beyond the Flood Forecast: Mapping the Cascading Impacts
NOAA and MITRE paired a knowledge graph with GIS to trace how infrastructure failures cascade beyond storm track and intensity.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Milwaukee was built on fill. A year ago, a 1,000-year storm dropped 14 inches of rain in a day and flooding traced those buried wetlands. With GIS and a 1837 survey map Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District is now guiding where the city builds green infrastructure. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
As Midwest Storms Grow More Extreme, Milwaukee’s Water Reclamation Agency Has a Plan
As extreme weather intensifies, Milwaukee's regional water agency shows what preparedness, spatial data, and green infrastructure can do.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Maps knit together a national sense of connectedness in the Smithsonian's "From These Lands" exhibit—600+ objects organized by geography, not state, plus a huge animated map that allows visitors to tour dynamic dimensions of the country. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Most infrastructure planning happens system by system. The cities getting ahead of failure map how those systems depend on each other. Three cities, three threats—a hurricane, a drought, a cyberattack—and all used GIS to help them see across systems to create fixes. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
How Does GIS Help Cities Prevent Cascading Infrastructure Failures?
See how LA County engineers stormwater systems and Durham rebuilt its network after a cyberattack, with real GIS deployments, not theory.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Seattle knew race and income shape who goes hungry, block by block, so they mapped it. Now, a Racial and Social Equity Index guides investments in services citywide. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
The US Forest Service's National Forests and Grasslands app carries all 165,000 miles of trails, real-time fire and closure alerts, and offline maps for off-grid areas. Built on the same authoritative data employees update daily. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
A GIS map made an invisible investment pattern visible. Corporate buyers now hold nearly one in eleven residential parcels in the US, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy traced exactly where. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
6,400 acres of pasture, rangeland, cornfields, and feedlot: Texas A&M is turning its McGregor Research Center into a proving ground for cattle tech — testing tools against real wind, dust, and 1,000 head running the full cattle cycle. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
In North Carolina's Outer Banks, 20 homes in Buxton have gone into the Atlantic since Sept. 2025. GIS analyst Kristen Stilson keeps watch with a drone, turning each flight into a swipeable record of the shrinking coast. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
426 chimpanzees, counted for the first time in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, living alongside mountain gorillas is a discovery that reshapes how the park will be protected. Fitting news for #WorldChimpanzeeDay, 66 years after Jane Goodall first walked into Gombe. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Every wake a sailor leaves is full of ocean life invisible to the eye. eDNA sampling catches the genetic traces. GIS catches the location. Together they turn a solo crossing into a living map of Pacific Ocean life, built one boat journey at a time. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
Crowdsourcing Ocean Research: How Sailors Are Filling a Gap for Science
Volunteer sailors are mapping Pacific Ocean biodiversity that scientists can't afford to reach—one water sample at a time.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Freeport-McMoRan built an enterprise GIS remediation platform to document decades of contamination cleanup, cutting compliance and legal risk on sites it acquired long ago. Read how the work is tracked parcel by parcel. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
The Maya Mapping Collaborative is capturing structures in Belize in 3D and adding the knowledge of local guides to make these ancient ruins come alive. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Baltimore PD analyzed 200,000 crime records and five years of call data before moving a single district boundary. The result: a shared operational map from the chief's office to the patrol car, and crime rates that are the lowest in 50 years. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
You can't monitor what you haven't mapped. The story behind UNESCO's Sites Navigator — and the wildfires, floods, and coral bleaching it now tracks. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Smart growth takes a data-driven approach. DC planners used digital twins to thread preservation and density. Sandy Springs used maps to grow without losing what made it worth growing into. Location intelligence changes outcomes. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Ancient maps were carved in stone. To read one, you had to go there. Today's maps are live, global, and in your pocket. We've come a long way—but the oldest ones still have something to teach us. esri.com/about/newsroom/blog/carved-in-stone-built-to-change
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
WCS is building the S&P 500 for nature's health—a single index to measure whether conservation is winning globally. Their Impact Platform already tracks the progress of 55 countries on one map. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
900+ turbines, 500 miles of transmission line, 3,000 workers—SunZia is North America's largest renewable energy project, and a shared map became the real-time conduit for communicating complexity and coordinating construction across all of it. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
The Largest Wind Project in the Americas Required a New Way to Build
Pattern Energy’s SunZia project transformed maps from a reference tool into an operational command center.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
"Nobody's coming to save us, so we have to figure out how to save ourselves." A Jamaican nonprofit led the national drone mapping response to a catastrophic hurricane with 320 communities mapped with 300+ hours of flight time. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Bunge knows its palm oil supply chain down to the plantation and uses that knowledge to keep growers productive on existing land, forests standing, and deforestation-free sourcing verifiable for the markets that demand it. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
Years Ahead of Regulation: Inside Bunge’s Traceability and Monitoring Platform
Bunge spent eight years building palm oil traceability that was ready when European Union deforestation rules arrived.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Five Department of Interior bureaus unified under one wildland fire mission in January. The shared digital platform connecting 35,000 firefighters across every jurisdiction has been integrating workflows for a decade. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
The Florida Seafloor Mapping Initiative deployed autonomous vessels that gathered sonar data around the clock, operated remotely from shore, with no crew aboard. A GIS pipeline automated handoffs from collection to public dashboards across 8,000 miles of coastline. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Typhoon Halong hit Alaska, tore through 40 roadless villages, and triggered the state's largest mass evacuation. Winter freeze-up was coming. Drone teams spread out to capture damage. AI assessed it at a scale never tried before. 🔗 esri.com/about/newsroom/blog/two-storms-alaskas-race-to-respond
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
Every last Friday in April, Arbor Day asks us to plant trees. But where trees land matters as much as how many. The Arbor Day Foundation's new Forest-Water Impact Map shows where planting trees and restoring forests absorbs more water. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
esri.com
The Arbor Day Foundation Reveals Where Trees Meet Water
How a new global map is guiding smarter reforestation to improve water infiltration and reduce stormwater runoff.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
OpenOceans Global is piloting its Ocean Plastic Pathways Initiative in Ecuador, tracing how plastic moves from land to sea through rivers and watersheds. Stop it upstream and you never have to clean it from the ocean floor. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
UK law now requires new development to leave nature 10 percent better off. Ordnance Survey built the data. Linckia built the tool. Wessex Water put it to work. Read how on the Esri Blog. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
The Swedish icebreaker Oden had a 1-in-5 chance of reaching Victoria Fjord. No ship had ever explored it. Marine geologists Martin Jakobsson and Larry Mayer made it—and what they found at the glacier face raised more questions than it answered. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica as the strongest storm on record. 626,000 people displaced. Roads buried. Power out. Team Rubicon's response—59 volunteers, 2,221 patients treated, 90 Greyshirts clearing debris—was guided by maps the whole way. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
A flesh-eating parasite is moving north through Central America at the speed of trucks because it's traveling with illegal cattle. The origin story of the New World screwworm crisis isn't being told. Until now. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Chattanooga mapped its way to National Park City. Irvine tracks every bench and tree to stay atop park rankings. Boulder has taxed itself for greenbelt preservation eight times. Three cities, one lesson: green space is infrastructure for health, connection, and growth.. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Virginia Beach emergency managers have four CAD systems and had 14 system logins when an EF3 tornado hit during a busy weekend. They fixed that — one watch desk, every feed, one view. Read how they did it. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
On the season's biggest snow day, Jackson Hole ski patrol set charges, triggered avalanches, and logged every result before first chair—using a GIS-based system built by Earth Analytics on ArcGIS. Operational intelligence that keeps the mountain safe and open. mediaspace.esri.com/media/t/1_ae...
mediaspace.esri.com
Jackson Hole Avalanche Risk Reduction
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort uses Earth Analytic's SmartMountain application to reduce avalanche hazard risk at the ski resort.
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
The "R" in PDRF used to stand for Recovery. After Super Typhoon Haiyan, the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation changed it—and rebuilt this network of private-sector aid around preparedness, prevention, and mitigation. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
AI researchers are racing to teach machines how the physical world works. The geospatial community has been building that foundation for fifty years, with decades of encoded knowledge that is exactly the asset the AI industry needs now. www.linkedin.com/pulse/gis-or...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
South Carolina has 28,000 miles of streams and scientists are still discovering what lives in them. A new GIS tool models aquatic biodiversity through the year 2100—protecting species before we know everything we'd lose. #AquaticConservation #GIS www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Heritage is inseparable from place. The Abuelas Project maps the oral histories, photos, and memories that Latinx grandmothers have carried for generations—before those places disappear. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
When back-to-back hurricanes hit Tampa Bay 14 days apart, Hillsborough County's GIS team worked around the clock — powering real-time damage assessments, guiding residents to shelters, and helping secure FEMA disaster declarations. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Patagonia's endangered huemul deer were disappearing into isolated pockets. Now, thanks to Rewilding Chile, they're finding their way back—guided by maps that turn field data into action. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Alabama's State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) captured detailed habitats and species status across one of the most biodiverse places in the world. Interactive GIS maps replaced spreadsheets, letting 140+ experts guide conservation decisions in days instead of weeks. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Downtown Chattanooga: 112°F. Three miles away: 90°F. That 22-degree gap explains why the city mapped 5.3 million trees with AI to guide strategic planting where heat hits hardest. City-university collaboration turning data into shade: www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
The Gulf Coast has lost 85% of its historical oyster reef. Learn how CV Carbon is paying oyster fishermen to bring it back. Each acre filters billions of gallons and blocks hurricane surge. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
California fire managers always knew fuel treatments worked. Now they document it with GIS to prove it with data—including what works best in different environments. The insights are transforming wildfire prevention. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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Matt Ball @spatialsustain.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
24 hours to plan Oklahoma City's largest celebration ever—500,000 fans for the Thunder's first NBA championship parade. The Oklahoma City Police Department used GIS to coordinate 1,200 personnel, a system tried and tested for years at the OKC Memorial Marathon. www.esri.com/about/newsro...
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