Weeknotes: 31st August 2026

Last week Habitat mapping After a few weeks of incremental improvement, I finally hit a stage where "progress" lead to regression in the results of my attempt to build up a habitat map. In part this comes from trying to infer certain things from Open Street Map data, and how different OSM communities approach things. For instance, in the UK any town will have a residential area enclosing polygon, but in practice that isn't the case in Brazil. If you happen to sample a point in a town that isn't an actual building then you are most likely just to get that as an unclassified area. In theory we could do some proximity inference, but for now I'm more interested in what is and isn't actually stated in the OSM data. I did find a close proxy, which in Brazil is using administrative zones at level 10. The admin zones in OSM are interesting, as each country has different levels of administrative zone based on how that country manages sub-regions. For Brazil there is one that is down to the…