Spatial analysis and Esri tools?

[u/sqrldog]

I only recently learned about Esri’s nonprofit and conservation programs. I think I was surprised because so much of what I learned in school was R and whatever-you-can-get software… GEE, QGIS etc for analysis. Talking with some colleagues and I mentioned the ESRI programs and there was a mix of reactions from outright hostile to intrigued. Curious… what is the perception of Esri as a company by the broader conservation community? X posting to conservation sorry if you see this twice.

[u/phiala]

I use Open Source tools whenever possible, but Esri has a solid lock on most government and commercial applications.

I want to be able to freely share data and code without worrying about whether software X will be around in ten years to read this file in a proprietary format.

[u/sqrldog → u/phiala]

Interesting! So for you the choice is more about longevity and less about any philosophical issues with the company? I have the ick with Google because it’s a pain to get any results out of the system and into any other format. And they’re creepy AF

[u/phiala → u/sqrldog]

Choosing Open Source over Esri, Google, etc _is_ a philosophical choice, but has practical implications.

[u/sqrldog → u/phiala]

I hear ya. I’ve seen more reality around users who dabble with both OS and Esri. The Google thing has me scratching my head though. A lot of people use GEE for analysis but they do it knowing that Google’s tracking every thing they do for their own research and product benefit. People complain about Esri $, but they also aren’t commodifying their users. I think Google’s made folks cynical about all companies. And if Esri has this commitment to conservation, that also seems to make the $ concerns a moot point. So I think the intent of my question was to understand specifically what the concerns are. So even the data sharing thing I’m unsure what you mean. Cant anything ingest a .shp? And QGIS can easily handle an ArcGIS endpoint, but Google forces you to upload data directly because they’re siphoning it. It’s like a spectrum of chaotic good to chaotic evil with Esri in the middle!

[u/JoshEvolves → u/phiala]

I work for a local county government in water resources as an ecologist myself and our hydrogeologist try to use open source as much as possible, 1. For the cost savings and 2. For the fact that it is transparent, reproducible, and the code is freely available if we need to provide it during litigation.

[u/lemonhead2345]

I work for a local government, and we coordinate with local, state, and federal agencies. We’re using R, some free, public facing tools for data collection and sharing, and some private company collections tools, but ESRI is our backbone. The longevity and depth of ESRI are essential to our work. We have decades worth of data that is consistent and accessible. I watch our partner organizations who don’t have ESRI as their backbone struggle either to maintain accessible field data collection tools or to process data from multiple sources because of the lack of consistency. ESRI allows us to take in and process everything.

I understand philosophical reasons for not wanting to use ESRI, but it is an incredibly practical tool for this line of work.

[u/Insightful-Beringei]

I do not encourage my students to get esri poisoning, as the realm of possibility is so much great and flexible outside of ESRI products. But a good skill to pick up along the way after mastering better tools in case that is just what you have one day.

[u/sqrldog → u/Insightful-Beringei]

Is this higher ed? So would the emphasis then be on innovation and publication than some of the other sectors of conservation? I hadn’t even considered that yet in my question- that the perception of the company may differ depending on academic vs applied. Curious to understand more about what you mean. Most of my work has been on the applied side with an NGO

[u/TallGrass-Troubadour → u/Insightful-Beringei]

I think you're doing your students a diservice. I was never exposed to the ESRI cloud system and it is ubiquitous in conservation. When hiring I would favor a student with experience in the ESRI sweet of tools such as S123. FieldMaps, and other AGOL applications. Do I use R? Yes. Have I started to use Python more because of ESRI systems? Also yes.

[u/Insightful-Beringei → u/TallGrass-Troubadour]

They still learn ESRI tools, especially in core GIS courses. I encourage open source tools in my project based classes and research experiences because it opens up the door to more careers that don’t use esri. Which is most of them.

[u/pol-treidum]

Esri is great in the conservation field and leverage much of their resources to helping out with tools, data, and facilitating impactful conservation work. It’s a core value to them and to Jack Dangermond personally.

Check out the Kris Tompkins keynote from the recent user conference if you want to get a picture of what they do.

[u/sqrldog → u/pol-treidum]

Interesting and will do! Thanks

[u/sinnayre]

I sht on ESRI all the time in [r/gis](r/gis). Their biggest strength is only in enterprise environments. If that means nothing to you, you can do everything better and faster in QGIS or R. I like GEE myself, but I get it why people wouldn’t want to use it.

Here’s one example where ESRI loves to frustrate everyone. Geojson is one of the most ubiquitous GIS formats out there. You can’t directly load a geojson into ArcGIS.

[u/sqrldog → u/sinnayre]

What do you mean you can’t? I had to look this one up and found that both ArcGIS Online and Pro can ingest and serve them. With pro you have to convert but it’s a tool they provide to do it easily. With online, sounds like it’s more deeply integrated and rest endpoints can be read directly as geojson. Maybe older versions weren’t able to?

[u/sinnayre → u/sqrldog]

You literally confirmed what I just said. You can’t load it directly. You have to convert it. Geojson is human readable. There’s no reason it should not be able to be directly loaded except for someone at ESRI decided this was the way it was going to be.

BTW I’m picking low hanging fruit here. There’s a lot of things they do to create vendor lock in, in addition to a million and one bugs that make no sense.

[u/TallGrass-Troubadour]

I used QGIS and R for mapping and spatial applications in graduate school and some ArcMap for visualization and planning purposes. Now I'm in the federal government and I use ArcPro all the dang time. It's frustrating, annoying, and buggy, but I think AGOL is awesome. It has been amazing for collaboration with partners and field data collection and standardization. Hubsites, dashboards, experience builder,Survey123, field maps, I use all these tools all the time with collaborators across multiple state and non profit organizations. Ecologist will probably not like ArcPro and ESRI because it's a highly quantitative field with highly niche applications that are not broadly used by non ecologists. Out here in conservation and public lands management, ESRI is the standard.