About Alper Dinçer

I’m Alper Dinçer — a UK-based geospatial engineer, entrepreneur, and climate tech innovator dedicated to turning complex environmental data into meaningful, human-centered insights. My work focuses on building data-driven systems that help communities, governments, and organizations understand and adapt to the growing impacts of drought and climate change.

Current Focus

I’m currently leading the development of the Global Drought Map, an open, browser-based platform that visualizes global drought and climate indicators through satellite, meteorological, and hydrological datasets. The platform leverages DuckDB, H3, PostGIS, Python, and NodeJS to process, query, and visualize large-scale datasets efficiently — often directly in the browser with WebAssembly and Cloudflare R2 for distributed access.

The Global Drought Map builds upon years of experience designing drought early warning systems for international agencies including:

• UNDP Madagascar: Developed a Drought Early Warning System to support early action and humanitarian decision-making across Madagascar, integrating CHIRPS precipitation data, SPI/SPEI indicators, and MODIS vegetation indices.
• UNICEF Somalia: Designed the Geospatial Dashboards and Data Integration Pipelines to bring together climate monitoring, vulnerability data, and forecast products for disaster risk reduction.
• Turkey’s National Drought Monitoring and Early Warning System (KTEUS): Helped implement a national-scale system that aggregates meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological indicators to inform regional drought planning.

Mekansal Software — A Climate-Tech Company

I’m also the founder of Mekansal Yazılım, a climate-tech and geospatial software company based in Turkey. Since its establishment, Mekansal has been developing innovative solutions at the intersection of GIS, remote sensing, and environmental analytics — with a mission to make spatial data more accessible and actionable for both public institutions and private organizations.

Under the Mekansal brand, we have delivered R&D projects that support national drought monitoring, agricultural productivity assessment, and natural hazard management. The company’s latest direction focuses on low-code spatial analytics — creating tools that enable decision-makers to visualize and analyze complex datasets without deep GIS expertise.

Our current R&D efforts include:

• Excel-Based Spatial Analysis Tool: A prototype designed to transform tabular datasets (such as PCodes, administrative data, or coordinates) into instant visualizations, powered by DuckDB and H3. The goal is to democratize geospatial insight and reduce the need for specialized GIS consultants.
• H3-Based Climate Indexing: Development of a national-scale geospatial data cube using H3 hexagons for drought and climate indicators (SPI, SPEI, FAPAR, NDVI, Soil Moisture Anomaly), enabling scalable and efficient multi-temporal analysis.
• MCDA and AHP Integration for Energy & Environment: Combining spatial decision-making models with renewable energy and land-use planning datasets for site selection and environmental impact analysis.

Research & Technical Interests

My technical interests lie in building geospatial data infrastructure that bridges open science, reproducibility, and high performance. I actively experiment with technologies like:

• DuckDB + WASM for in-browser geospatial analytics
• PostGIS for advanced spatial SQL and topology operations
• H3 for hierarchical spatial indexing and climate data aggregation
• Cloudflare R2 + Pages for scalable, serverless hosting of geospatial data
• MapLibre for open, high-performance web mapping

Beyond the technical layer, I’m deeply interested in the intersection of data ethics, accessibility, and climate resilience — how we can design systems that empower communities and reduce the barriers to understanding environmental risks.

Vision

My long-term vision is to help shape a new generation of climate-tech tools — open, transparent, and globally inclusive. Tools that don’t just display maps, but help people make better decisions about water, agriculture, and sustainability.

Through this blog, I aim to document not only my technical journey but also the lessons learned from real-world climate resilience projects across continents.

Let’s Connect

You can connect with me on LinkedIn, explore my code on GitHub, or check out Global Drought Map to see my latest work in action.

Thanks for visiting — and welcome to my corner of the web.