MalaGIS

Sharing GIS Technologies, Resources and News.

On September 10, 2025, the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA) announced Notice No. 12 of 2025, officially approving the establishment of the Huangyan Island National Nature Reserve. In accordance with the relevant provisions of the "Regulations of the People's Republic of China on Nature Reserves," the area, scope, and functional zoning of the Huangyan Island National Nature Reserve are hereby published. The reserve is located in Sansha City, Hainan Province, covering a total area of 3,523.67 hectares. This includes a core zone of 1,242.55 hectares and an experimental zone of 2,281.12 hectares. The primary conservation objective is the coral reef ecosystem. The main areas are shown in the figure below:

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Many friends often leave messages on the MalaGIS website asking if there are free DEM data download resources. While other users have shared numerous posts on this topic—covering data sources like SRTM, ASTER GDEM, ALOS, and Copernicus DEM—these are relatively professional datasets typically manageable only by GIS practitioners. So, are there tools suitable for beginners or the general public? For instance, a tool that allows online viewing of a region's terrain with 3D rendering effects without the need to download professional GIS or 3D software? Recently, I discovered a small tool called WorldViewR and would like to share it with you.

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Recently, Nano Banana has been explosively popular, with many novel use cases emerging online, such as generating figurines, image restoration, and architectural image generation models. Attracted by these, we also tried it out and discovered two small applications related to GIS. Today, we'd like to share the prompts with you (Code is Cheap, show me the talk).

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Last year, our team introduced how to load lunar datasets in Cesium. Now, one year later, Cesium has officially begun supporting the Mars dataset—Cesium Mars. Cesium Mars is a 3D Tileset designed to enable developers and researchers to quickly create visualizations and simulations of Mars. The dataset integrates laser altimeter data (MOLA) from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), high-resolution stereo camera imagery (HRSC) from ESA's Mars Express, and color satellite image rendering, realistically recreating the visual appearance of Mars.

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In the previous article titled "Displaying Selected Layer Count in QGIS with PyQGIS - MalaGIS", the author introduced a method to quickly view the number of selected layers using QGIS's Python API. However, if you need this functionality, you must open QGIS, then open the Python Console, locate the saved Python script file, and run it every single time. Although this process is simple, it can become tedious after repeated use. So, is there a way to automatically run a Python script when QGIS starts up? The author searched online and finally found a temporarily viable method to share today.

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A few days ago, while browsing the Malagis GIS group, someone asked if there was a source to download global wildfire data. At that time, I didn’t have relevant resources on hand. After doing some research, I found NASA FIRMS, a website that supports GIS visualization of data and allows online downloads for viewing and analysis in software like ArcGIS and QGIS. Today, I’d like to share this resource with everyone.

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Preface: This article is compiled based on the author's experience with internet mapping services. While consumer map applications offer automatic location detection, professional GIS tools like QGIS lack this functionality natively. This guide demonstrates how to implement this feature.

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Preface: This article is compiled from a community submission. All names and project details are fictional. The core content has been edited for clarity. Any resemblance to real events is coincidental.

An urgent request emerged regarding a GIS business system we developed three years ago. Their management had recently switched to Huawei triple-foldable phones, revealing significant compatibility issues with our system.

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When working with numerous layers in QGIS, it is often necessary to select multiple layers simultaneously for operations. However, with a large number of layers, it becomes difficult to quickly discern exactly how many are selected—don't worry, you can easily solve this by writing a small tool with PyQGIS!

Today, we share two methods to display the count of selected layers in real-time. These methods are straightforward to implement, with clear code, and can be tried by those in need.

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In a previous article titled "「GIS Data」Chinese Geographic Region Partition Vector Data", we shared vector data on geographic region partitions. Recently, some users in our group requested geomorphological data. After searching, we actually found a 1:1,000,000 geomorphological type spatial distribution dataset from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and are sharing it with everyone.

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