On September 23, 2026, the H3 community met at Uber's office in New York City for the first H3 Conference, hosted by Fused and Uber. The talks covered crop acreage, land suitability, climate data, basketball, energy infrastructure, indoor positioning, newsroom maps and more.
Every recording is in the H3 Conference 2026 playlist. Below is a short guide to each talk, with a link to its full write-up.
Tula van Balen of BCG presented H3 Parcel Suitability at the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City: a single Fused canvas that answers how well suited a piece of land is by putting every relevant dataset on the same H3 grid. The session wasn't recorded, so this post walks through the canvas Tula presented.
Sina Kashuk, CEO of Fused, and Isaac Brodsky, CTO and co-founder of Fused, both worked on H3 at Uber. In this talk at the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, they revisited the H3 ideas Sina presented eight years ago and showed two new things built on them: an AI model that scores hexagons offline on a laptop, and an open H3-native climate dataset.
Kristin Scholten is a farmer turned data scientist in the advanced analytics department at Nationwide, and she is building OpenFields, an AI prediction engine for agriculture. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, she argued that crop acreage is decided months before any satellite can see a plant, and showed how she used H3 to put a crop probability on every field in North Dakota.
Guillaume Sueur is the founder of Geomermaids, a Boston-based consultancy that designs cloud-native geospatial systems, with 25 years in GIS. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, Guillaume showed how H3 can give GeoParquet something it lacks today: overviews, built as a self-discovering pyramid of files keyed by H3 cell.
Marie Hoeger is a Staff Engineer at Carbon Mapper, where she works on the data systems behind a freely accessible catalog of global methane and CO2 emissions observations, and previously led a geospatial ML platform team at Pachama. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, she shared lessons from two projects: combining many data layers on H3 to score land for reforestation across Brazil, and mapping sparse global methane detections.
Matt Forrest of Wherobots is a geospatial data expert who helps GIS professionals adopt cloud-native geospatial infrastructure and hosts the Spatial Stack podcast. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, he showed how H3 turned the question "where is the geography of basketball?" into a single index that can be compared across the whole country.
Levente Juhász is an Assistant Professor of Geospatial Analytics at the University of Florida and director of the Geospatial Analytics, Technology and Open Research (GATOR) Lab. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, Levente argued that GeoAI models built on flat, pixel-based maps carry projection distortion into their answers, and that discrete global grid systems (DGGS) such as H3 are a better foundation, as long as you understand their trade-offs.
Mo Fotouhi is a Senior Manager of Data Science at John Deere, where he leads teams working on geospatial intelligence and AI for agriculture. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City he gave a lightning talk he described as a love letter to H3 with footnotes: H3 makes agricultural data easy to combine, but field-level questions need finer detail and a sense of time that H3 does not provide on its own.
Robert Murphy is CEO of Othersphere, a spatial economics platform spun out of Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy that helps decide where energy-intensive infrastructure should be built. At the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City he showed how Othersphere tiles the world with H3 so developers and financial firms can screen everywhere for good sites before digging into the details.
Sean Gorman is a co-founder of Zephr, a positioning and navigation AI company. In a talk pre-recorded and played at the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City, he showed how Zephr uses one H3 index, at two resolutions, to organize both GNSS corrections and indoor visual map tiles for a single positioning engine.
Xun Li, a Software Engineer at Foursquare who works on the Foursquare Spatial Agent and the Foursquare H3 Hub, presented three free tools Foursquare has built on H3. The key point: when every dataset already shares the same H3 cells, an AI agent can answer a spatial question from a single sentence, because it only has to choose and weight layers rather than solve geometry. The talk was pre-recorded and played at the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City.
Tim Wallace, Senior Editor for Geography at The New York Times, toured maps made for the news and for fun, from newsroom projects built on building footprints and satellite imagery to grid-based art drawn by a pen plotter. In the Q&A, Tim made the case that everything about a map, from its shape and tone to what gets labeled, shapes the reader's experience. The talk was presented at the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City.
Farmers and analysts face a familiar challenge: weather and crop data is fragmented, slow to process, and hard to act on.
We worked with Emma Quirk (Senior Data Analyst) and Majid Alivand (Senior Data & Analytics Manager) to showcase how Fused can help bring all these datasets together. In this webinar they give an overview of the industry challenges interfacing backend data analytics with frontend data consumption. Emma walks through the notebook she used to model climate and irrigation patterns for vineyards.
TL;DR Enriching your spatial data with GERS IDs can make it interoperable across the data ecosystem. You can use Fused UDFs to create custom HTTPS endpoints to enrich your data with GERS.
The Global Entity Reference System (GERS) is a framework that structures, encodes, and matches map data to a shared universal reference within Overture. GERS helps organizations identify and reference their own datasets with standard identifiers to Overture data to help unify datasets.
In this blog post we show how to create simple endpoints with Fused UDFs to enrich a dataset with GERS IDs. We'll use the Overture Building footprints to first enrich a polygon with GERS IDs then another one to look-up metadata for a specified GERS ID.
TL;DR Elizabeth Rosenbloom creates hotspot maps to identify key areas where Arundo donax is likely to spread, streamlining analysis to improve invasive species mitigation.
In 2020 while working in Silicon Valley for the county of Santa Clara Valley, I became obsessed with improving monitoring and prevention efforts surrounding Arundo donax. The search and mitigation process this invasive plant species, Arundo donax, was a Sisophisian struggle that had been subject to the same procedures year in and year out, with no progress on beating the spread. To improve the efficacy and efficiency in battling against this notorious weed, I decided to build a tool that would identify the key areas for mitigation - both for the frequency of propagation (occurrence) and for spread potential.
In this blog post I show how I used Fused to create a map of key hotspots where Arundo donax is likely to spread based on built-environment factors derived from Overture Maps data.
TL;DR Chris Amico shows how to combine Overture Maps data with fire perimeters to analyze wildfire impact on buildings and businesses.
As communities continue to rebuild and recover from the devastation caused by natural disasters such as wildfires, the question remains: How can we quantify what was lost, especially in the built environment? With the ability to analyze detailed building footprints and overlay fire boundaries, we can begin to answer this by providing a rough estimate of the damage and identifying which structures were impacted by the flames.
In this blog post, Chris Amico shows how by leveraging data such as Overture Building footprints and fire progression maps, we can gain insight into the extent of fire risk. This enables news agencies to derive insights such as count of shops or homes exposed or even assess the capacity of highway routes for residents to evacuate before a prospect fire reaches them.
TL;DR GLS uses Fused to create internal tooling to optimize routing for parcel delivery operations.
In the parcel delivery business, geospatial analyses are crucial to answer questions about daily operations. Do delivery drivers visit the same regions each day, letting them know their areas intimately? Or is there a high volatility of the regions? And of course, how do we optimize the routes of multiple drivers servicing the same region?
Those are the questions Antonius is working on at GLS Studio, an innovation lab by GLS (General Logistics Systems) which is an international parcel delivery service provider.
In this blog post, Antonius highlights how he uses Fused to create stable delivery areas for single-day and multi-day aggregates.