GeoAI for Climate, Environment & Health
Practical GIS Workflows for Young Surveyors — Zimbabwe Young Surveyors Network Pre-Conference Workshop
Access the Course on PALSlab Hub
All participants work directly on the browser — no install, no downloads. Log in with the account you registered, run one setup cell, and your personal copy of the notebooks is ready.
Open PALSlab Hub →About this workshop
Climate change is already affecting human health in measurable ways. This workshop introduces young surveyors and geomatics professionals to the use of health data, Earth observation products, and GeoAI workflows in climate and health applications.
Participants work through six Jupyter notebooks — following the WorldQuant University format with concept notes, worked examples, and graded exercises — progressing from basic spatial health data to a natural-language AI interface over a real environmental database.
Course notebooks
| # | Topic | Time | What you build |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Spatial Health Data | 25 min | Geocoded facility map, CRS basics, PID-as-string bug |
| 02 | Environmental Datasets | 20 min | Climate grid, 2×2 spatial maps, nearest-cell concept |
| 03 | The Spatial Join | 20 min | cKDTree join from scratch, grid values on point locations |
| 04 | Exposure Timeline Generation | 25 min | Per-day pregnancy timelines with time-varying locations |
| 05 | Earth Engine Extraction | 20 min | ERA5, CHIRPS, MODIS sources; optional live EE demo |
| 06 | Characterisation, EDA & GeoAI | 30 min | Trimester summaries, maps, DuckDB SQL, NL-to-SQL AI |
How to access the course
Option A — PALSlab Hub (recommended, no install)
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Request access Submit a short access request at portal.placealert.org/duckrequest/request. Provide your name, email, institution, and intended hub username. The workshop team approves requests — do this before 25 June and you will receive your login details.
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Log in and open the setup notebook After logging in you will see JupyterLab. In the file browser on the left, navigate to
PALS → GeoAI_Workshopand open00_Start_Here.ipynb. -
Run the setup cell Run the single cell in
00_Start_Here.ipynb. It copies the workshop notebooks and data to your personalGeoAI_Workshop/folder — takes about 10 seconds. -
Open notebook 01 and begin Navigate to your
GeoAI_Workshop/folder and open01_spatial_health_data.ipynb. Work through notebooks 01 → 06 in order. Run all cells top-to-bottom;🧪 YOUR TURNcells ask you to write code and✔cells give instant feedback.
Option B — Run locally (if offline or preferred)
Download the materials below, install Python if needed, and run on your own laptop.
Extract the zip, then pip install duckdb ipywidgets scipy, and open 01_spatial_health_data.ipynb with Jupyter.
Prerequisites
- Basic Python familiarity (read a CSV, print a variable) — no advanced programming required
- Familiarity with coordinates (latitude, longitude) from your surveying background
- A laptop or tablet with a modern browser — no Python install needed if using PALSlab Hub (Option A)
- A PALSlab Hub account — request access at portal.placealert.org/duckrequest/request before 25 June
- Google Earth Engine account for the optional live demo in Notebook 05 — sign up free here
Conveners
P T Makanga · Z Chinwadzimba · R Sibanda
CeSHHAR Zimbabwe & Place Alert Labs, Midlands State University
Hosted at the Zimbabwe Young Surveyors Network Pre-Conference, ahead of the Survey Institute of Zimbabwe Annual Conference and AGM.