Dr. Milos Popovic is a leading data visualization specialist and Product Manager at Booking.com in Amsterdam who has established himself as one of the most prolific and talented map creators using R programming. According to NodeXL analysis, he ranks among the Top 10 dataviz and R contributors on Twitter, a testament to his consistent output of stunning visualizations and helpful tutorials.
Milos describes his mission as "painting the world with R and teaching you how to unleash your inner map artist." His portfolio includes over 300 maps, primarily featuring breathtaking 3D terrain visualizations created using the rayshader package in combination with ggplot2. His signature style involves transforming satellite-derived data—particularly forest canopy heights from the ETH Global Sentinel-2 dataset and Copernicus land cover data—into dramatic 3D landscapes that reveal environmental patterns across countries worldwide.
His YouTube channel "Milos Makes Maps" has grown to over 3,000 subscribers, offering step-by-step video tutorials that teach viewers how to replicate his techniques. Each tutorial comes with accompanying code available on GitHub, making his methods fully reproducible. Topics range from creating hex maps of carbon emissions to interpolating air pollution data and building 3D elevation models with land cover overlays.
What sets Milos apart is his commitment to education and accessibility. Rather than keeping techniques proprietary, he shares every script, explains every function, and responds to followers attempting to recreate his work for their own countries and datasets. His tutorials have inspired a community of practitioners creating similar visualizations for regions from Sri Lanka to Turkey to Poland. Whether showing forest height variations across Germany's lowlands and mountains or visualizing tree canopy patterns in the Netherlands, Milos demonstrates that beautiful cartography is achievable for anyone willing to learn R and follow along with his clear, engaging instruction.
