Spatial Snippets is our weekly round-up of all the bits and pieces of geospatial news that didn’t make it into our normal daily coverage.
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There’s a new event on the surveying calendar, being the Leica Future Forum, coming up at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre on 14 and 15 May 2026. Hosted by Leica Geosystems and C.R. Kennedy, the event will see 10 invited international speakers from Leica and Hexagon join the local team to run a number of workshops, covering topics such as geomatics, reality capture, monitoring and utility detection. Plus, there’ll be an opportunity to inspect all the latest gear.
Also coming up in Queensland is Surveyors Australia’s 2026 National Surveying Congress, to be held on Hamilton Island from 3 to 6 August 2026. Yes, there’ll be lots of speakers and keynotes and workshops and all the usual things, but… it’s Hamilton Island! Is there any need to say more?
Much closer, time wise, is the Institution of Surveyors New South Wales’ annual conference, taking place next week (Thursday and Friday) in Wollongong. It has a packed program, and the organisers are expecting many hundreds of professionals to attend.
If geodesy is your thing, you might like the TIGER Symposium in Geodesy 2026, which will take place between 28 September and 1 October 2026 in Gävle (Sweden); it will also be online. The call has gone out for abstract submissions, the deadline for which is 15 April.
Still on surveying conferences, and if you enjoyed the FIG conference in Brisbane last year, you might like to consider travelling to South Africa for this year’s event, the XXVIII Congress, to be held in late May and hosted by the South African Geomatics Council and the South African Geomatics Institute. Full details are available on the event website.
Another conference coming up in South Africa will be the 136th Member Meeting of the Open Geospatial Consortium, to be held from 19 to 23 October 2026. The event will bring together experts from government, industry and academia to work on the development of open geospatial standards.
And don’t forget Geo Connect Asia 2026, coming up on 31 March and 1 April in Singapore. The event is expected to attract around 3,000 delegates, and will comprise multiple individual events on a range of topics from indoor mapping to smart mining.
Well-known NSW surveyor, Ian Iredale, has a released a surveying app for Android that uses daytime observations of stars. According to Ian, it enables surveyors to obtain very accurate true north and grid azimuths much quicker than conventional survey means. Known as Starry Starry Day Professional, the price is just $0.99. The latest version is out now, but here’s a video that shows how an earlier iteration of the app works:
If you use drones in your work, you might like to peruse the new Drone Privacy Guidelines issued by the federal government. The guidelines are based around six principles:
- Inform others or obtain consent;
- Minimise viewing, recording and/or collection of data;
- Only use data for the original purpose;
- Handle data securely;
- Know the laws and rules; and
- Be aware of the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles.
New Zealand’s Office of the Surveyor-General has updated and refined the Utility Survey Standard – LINZ OP S 01287, which specifies the requirements for surveying and recording the position of utility assets. It builds on the Utility Location Standard that was launched in 2022 and incorporates new accuracy standards for surveying drainage invert levels.
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