Jack Tivey Geospatial Portfolio

There was no usable spatial dataset of English golf courses, so I built one. Coverage starts as a bulk extract from open mapping data, which gets you most of the country and almost none of the accuracy — boundaries drawn to no consistent rule, inconsistent tagging, courses missing, and entries that closed or relocated years ago. The dataset is the correction pass, not the extract.

County by county, every polygon is checked against satellite imagery and redrawn in QGIS and geojson.io where it is wrong, to a single rule — operational extent: playable ground plus clubhouse, car park and driving range where present. Not the legal freehold, which is not visible from imagery and would have meant guessing. Each county is then reconciled against independent listings to catch closures, relocations and duplicates. The result is 1,773 courses across 47 English counties. I built the React admin tool that runs the review.

Whilst Vestige is my brainchild, it is a shared project. Tom writes the code for the iOS app and I expand and maintain its dataset. In-app features and decisions are always split, and through this we have created something we are very proud of.

Visit vestige.golf →

Vestige is a commercial project operated through Pinehollow Studios Limited, co-founded with Tom Slater.

Undergraduate dissertation, titled Assessing the UK's Agricultural Capability for Producing Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs) from Oilseed Rape. Seven criteria drawn from the agronomic literature — precipitation, mean air temperature, soil pH, growing degree days, sunshine hours, drought severity and distance to processing — were reclassified onto a common 1 to 10 suitability scale, weighted by pairwise comparison using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, and combined into a single national surface. Precipitation carried the heaviest weight at 30.5%, temperature 25.3% and soil pH 19.7%. Slope was handled separately as a binary constraint, excluding anything above 15%. The result was then clipped to existing agricultural land, which cut the theoretically suitable area to roughly 6 million hectares — around half what full domestic demand would require.

The method generalises. Narrowing a whole country to the land meeting a defined set of conditions is the same problem whatever the conditions are.

Monitoring studies built during my degree, each taking an environmental change and finding a way to measure it from satellite data: landcover change detection tracking four decades of greenhouse expansion in Almería, an NDVI Z-score time series measuring vegetation anomaly around Porto Velho in the Amazon, and burn-scar mapping across the uKhahlamba World Heritage site to assess whether managed firebreaks were holding.

Baseline monitoring in method if not in subject — establish the normal condition, then measure movement away from it.

A hazard management plan for the Krakatoa region, combining elevation, population density, age structure, purchasing power and distance to hospitals into a multi-criteria vulnerability surface, then modelling inundation for two eruption scenarios against it. The analysis identified Bandar Lampung, 75km north-east and home to 1.16 million people, as the priority area, and the plan set out costed intervention options against it. The audience for a hazard plan is people making decisions under time pressure, so the work had to reduce to maps that could be read quickly and correctly.

Turning spatial analysis into something a non-specialist can act on is most of the job.