Spatial reasoning over terrain, reach, and movement
Terrain profiles, reachability polygons, and GPS map matching for ESG reporting, conservation, and field research.
Environmental work is geographical work. Whether you're modelling carbon corridors, certifying ESG service-area claims, or running a conservation patrol, the questions reduce to: what's reachable, what's the terrain like, and where did people or assets actually go?
Footstep's elevation, isochrone, and snap-trace tools answer those questions at agent speed. get_elevation returns ascent, descent, and a difficulty classification on top of raw heights. get_isochrone returns reachability polygons by foot, bike, or vehicle. snap_trace cleans noisy GPS into road-attributed segments with surface, class, speed, and grade per matched edge.
All outputs are GeoJSON-ready (set format: "geojson"). Drop them into deck.gl, Mapbox GL, kepler.gl, Leaflet, or QGIS without a transformation step.
What this looks like in practice
Common shapes mapped to the tools you'd reach for.
Service-area certification
Compute 30-minute walking isochrones from a list of facilities. Intersect against population data to substantiate access-equity claims in ESG reports.
Field-trace cleanup
snap_trace turns a noisy patrol GPS log into a confidence-scored polyline aligned to actual roads or paths, with surface and grade per edge. Useful for habitat-impact assessments and vehicle-emissions estimates.
Terrain-aware planning
Pair get_elevation with get_directions to produce an explicit difficulty classification on a hiking or cycling route. Used by conservation organisations to brief volunteer patrols.
The Footstep tools that fit this shape
A focused subset of the catalogue. Click any card for the full reference.
get_elevationElevation values for coordinates or paths, with summary statistics.
get_isochroneEverywhere reachable within a time or distance budget. Returns a polygon boundary.
snap_traceMap-match a GPS trace to the road network with surface, class, speed, and grade.
get_matrixTravel times and distances between every origin and destination pair.
Other use cases
Search, rescue, and crisis response
Score where a missing person is most likely to be found. Direct ground teams to the highest-density hexes first.
Read →Logistics and autonomous fleets
Multi-stop optimisation, OD matrices, and corridor search for the agents and backends that move things.
Read →Real estate and property
Geocode listings, model commute reach, score nearby amenities, and overlay terrain risk. The toolkit behind agent-led property search.
Read →Travel and itinerary planning
Find places, route between them, fit them into a time budget, and surface what's on the way. The geospatial layer behind agentic trip planners.
Read →Customer-input cleanup
Fix typos, expand abbreviations, validate before geocoding. The reliable pre-step for agents handling user-typed addresses.
Read →Field service and dispatch
Optimise visit order, score reachable jobs from each tech, clean GPS into proof-of-visit records.
Read →Insurance and risk underwriting
Anchor addresses, layer terrain and elevation, assess access from emergency services. Bulk-process portfolios in one call.
Read →Healthcare access and equity
Compute drive-time and walk-time access to facilities, model coverage gaps, place ambulances with travel-time matrices.
Read →Sales and territory planning
Build OD matrices between reps and accounts, draw catchments around offices, normalise lead addresses at scale.
Read →Outdoor and fitness apps
Plan walking, hiking, and cycling routes with explicit difficulty. Snap noisy GPS into clean traces with surface and grade per edge.
Read →Public-sector planning
Model who can reach what, where the gaps are, how transit changes the answer. Reachability and matrix tools for civic planning.
Read →