Welcome to our newsletter on everything related to impact data.

In this newsletter we will cover:

• Interesting variable: Distribution of wastewater plants across Europe
• Interesting tool: Overpass Turbo
• Interesting read: Copernicus Satellite Imagery for Ship Spotting
• Interesting dataset: Foursquare OS Places 100M

Interesting variable: Distribution of wastewater plants across Europe

In this edition of our newsletter, we present a map created using Overpass Turbo and QGIS, highlighting the distribution of wastewater treatment plants across Europe.

Unsurprisingly, the highest concentration of these facilities aligns with densely populated areas, a pattern often referred to as the “Blue Banana” phenomenon. However, beyond their necessity for sanitation, wastewater plants also pose a significant environmental challenge. Many of them emit greenhouse gases, and there are currently no established mechanisms for capturing these emissions.

To put this into perspective, Germany alone has over 10,000 wastewater treatment plants, according to the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety, and Consumer Protection. Each of these facilities requires solutions to mitigate CO₂ emissions.

If you’re interested in replicating this map, you can retrieve the data from Overpass Turbo using the query “man_made”=”wastewater_plant” and visualize it in QGIS.

Interesting tool: Overpass Turbo

Overpass Turbo is a powerful, web-based query tool designed to access and visualize OpenStreetMap data. Overpass Turbo enables you to extract detailed geographical information.

Let’s look at some examples. Suppose you’re interested in the distribution of hotels around Lake Constance. With Overpass Turbo’s wizard, you can quickly generate a query and see the results. The map reveals a clear pattern: a high concentration of hotels on the northern shore, while the Swiss side has noticeably fewer. This raises interesting questions—are prices, available properties, or simply the view influencing this distribution?

The number of playgrounds is also interesting. First, it is nice that an open-source platform contains 1,5 million entries for playgrounds. That is quite impressive. Beyond the numbers, playground locations can also serve as an indicator of local investment in public spaces. The map below highlights playgrounds in Friedrichshafen, a wealthy city on the northern shore of Lake Constance, providing insight into how much communities invest in family-friendly infrastructure.

Interesting read: Copernicus Satellite Imagery for Ship Spotting

A recent Copernicus webinar was a good illustration how Sentinel-1 SAR data can be used to monitor global shipping activities. Satellite imagery allows users to detect vessels, estimate speeds, and analyze environmental impacts such as oil spills and illegal fishing. By cross-referencing open satellite data with AIS tracking services like MarineTraffic, researchers can verify ship locations and monitor maritime activities in near real-time. The results are very impressive.

The webinar highlighted real-world applications, including tracking ship collisions, estimating vessel size using satellite shadows, and measuring ship speed through wave patterns.

Interesting dataset: Foursquare OS Places 100M

Foursquare has released a dataset of 100 million points of interest. It is quite comprehensive as it includes the name of the business, the coordinates, the address, phone number, website, e-mail, facebook, Instagram, twitter and even the geometry of the place.

Foursquare has also discussed the decision why they have open sourced the dataset given that it has significant value. It seems that there are strategic considerations given the dominance of Google Maps, new AI-based business models and the need to have crowd-sourced validation of the data, while still offering paid and premium services.