Development Seed

Groundwork 04 is our quarterly look at small, practical experiments by our team that are shaped by real questions we’re hearing across the cloud-native geospatial community.

GeoAI agents. Browser-native raster rendering. STAC tooling. Transit data as GeoParquet.

ds.io/groundwork04

I did a thing! I got my example data running on @developmentseed.org's stac-map on my GitHub Pages site. The data is bounding boxes of three USGS topos. Eventually it will be maps we're scanning and gereferencing. It's not perfect, but it's progress! #gischat

micheletobias.github.io/historical-s...

We aren't the only science support organizations migrating data operations to the cloud. Hear how NASA's MAAP and VEDA projects are helping researchers put the cloud to work from Aimee Barciauskas of @developmentseed.org

Full video➡️ https://loom.ly/aFt5RGU

An Earth-view from space showing the blue curve of the planet against a dark background. The foreground features the EOPF logo—a stylized "E" combined with a colourful cube and a cloud icon. To the right, the text reads "WEBINAR #1 EXPLORER" in orange and white. At the bottom, the ESA and EOF logos are displayed in white.

📅 Join the official launch of the #EOPF #Sentinel #Zarr Explorer: 9 March (15:00 CET)
Supported by @esa.int, this webinar demonstrates browser-based Sentinel data visualisation using Zarr/GeoZarr.
@thrivegeo.bsky.social @developmentseed.org @eox.at
🔗 Register: www.tickettailor.com/events/thriv...

NASA Earthdata just got a major boost.

GIBS + EGIS mapping services are now integrated into the VEDA platform, giving users one place to explore and analyze Earth science data.

Open standards → less duplication, more capability, truly cloud‑native workflows

www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/alerts-...

• STAC-based discovery
• Browser-based visualisation
• Reproducible openEO workflows
• No downloads

Explore: explorer.eopf.copernicus.eu

Read more: developmentseed.org/blog/2026-02...

Webinar on March 9: www.tickettailor.com/events/thriv...

🧵2/2

Sentinel data is moving to Zarr.

The real question: is the ecosystem ready?

We built the EOPF Sentinel Zarr Explorer with @esa.int , @eox.at & @thrivegeo.bsky.social to demonstrate cloud-native Sentinel workflows in practice:

🧵 1/2

Anthony Boyd and Wille Marcel are speaking at ICTC 2026 in Lima 🇵🇪

On Feb 19, they’ll share practical ways to choose open-source geospatial tools based on real project needs, plus a lightning talk on interactive storytelling with NASA’s VEDA.

Hope to see folks there. Hablamos español.

Join us on Tuesday, Feb 24th, for an epic send-off for our Washington, DC office. Food, beverages, music, community & memories!
RSVP: luma.com/d8leo2k9

Just published: our story working with the Vanuatu Bureau of Statistics to make climate science and satellite data practical for local decision-making.

Tutorials & an interactive dashboard are open and reusable.

Read more: ds.io/vanuatu

What does “cloud‑friendly” Earth data mean?
In this @thrivegeo.bsky.social interview, @yayyyimee.bsky.social breaks it down — from NASA’s cloud migration to why geospatial needs its own “Amazon fulfillment center” moment.

Great listen!

scenefromabove.podbean.com/e/scene-from...

Join us on Tuesday, Feb 24th, for an epic send-off for our Washington, DC office. Food, beverages, music, community & memories!
RSVP: luma.com/d8leo2k9

GitHub - developmentseed/async-geotiff: Fast, async GeoTIFF and COG reader for Python Fast, async GeoTIFF and COG reader for Python. Contribute to developmentseed/async-geotiff development by creating an account on GitHub.

Repo: github.com/developments...

Built at @developmentseed.org

Introducing Async-GeoTIFF - async-geotiff A fast, async GeoTIFF and Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) reader for Python.

Introducing 𝐀𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐜-𝐆𝐞𝐨𝐓𝐈𝐅𝐅, a new library for reading GeoTIFFs and COGs. developmentseed.org/async-geotif...

- Fast, with a Rust core
- Uses a non-blocking thread pool for image decoding
- Integrates with NumPy, PyProj, Affine & Morecantile
- Remote data support with Obstore
- No GDAL dependency

🏔️ Snowpack futures

The VEDA Dashboard shows how climate change could reshape Western U.S. “water towers.”

Explore + share your ideas for resilience.

👉 www.earthdata.nasa.gov/dashboard/s...

Wei Ji Leong, PhD is presenting a poster at CliC OSC 2026 in Wellington on building capacity in Vanuatu for climate change monitoring and disaster preparedness.

📌 Poster sessions: Feb 10–11
clic2026.com

❄️ Blizzards aren’t just snowstorms.

They disrupt travel, strain power grids, damage crops, and cost billions.

A VEDA Dashboard Story digs into the science + impacts of these extreme winter events.

Read here 👉 www.earthdata.nasa.gov/dashboard/st...

Graphic for a Development Seed blog post titled “Predicting Earth Observations,” featuring abstract satellite imagery and a headshot of author Will Rynearson.

Earth observation data is everywhere. Getting it in time is still the hard part.

EO Predictor is a map-first tool that estimates where satellite observations are likely to happen over the next 48 hours—useful for disaster response & other time-sensitive work.

developmentseed.org/blog/2026-01...

Visualize a mosaic of NAIP imagery loaded from @microsoft.com Planetary Computer COGs, all in your browser, no server involved.

Render true color, false color infrared, or NDVI. developmentseed.org/deck.gl-rast...

Built at @developmentseed.org with deck.gl-raster: github.com/developments...

Had a great week spending time IRL with my @developmentseed.org team in Lisbon. I work with the smartest, kindest people and I’m feeling energized to finish the year strong and looking forward to 2026. 🫶

Bom dia!

📍DevSeed Lisbon

We’re heading to Auckland 🇳🇿 for @foss4g2025.bsky.social to talk Rust 🦀 + open geospatial.

Catch our team showing how modern tools make geospatial faster and more interoperable.

Find us for zines + join the GeoRust sprint.

Get the deets: developmentseed.org/blog/2025-10...

#foss4g #osgeo

Slides for my @foss4gna.bsky.social NA talk, "Cloud-Native Geospatial Metadata with stac-geoparquet" are at www.gadom.ski/presentation...

I subtitled the talk "Practical STAC", because #stac-geoparquet was motivated by real-world problems found while managing large @stacspec.bsky.social systems

We took Canada’s Spatial Access Measures dataset (big, clunky CSVs) → turned it into a single GeoParquet file.

Add DuckDB-WASM + deck.gl & you get
- instant queries
- smooth maps
- no backend

Public data, but actually usable.
developmentseed.org/blog/2025-10...

@saadiqmohiuddin.bsky.social

New blog post! kylebarron.dev/blog/fast-py...

This dives into performance pitfalls of Python bindings, why projects like Lonboard are so fast, and why I care about Apache Arrow so much. The post is high level and you don't need to know C/C++/Rust to understand it!

Committers List of project-management committee (PMC) members and committers on the Apache Arrow project.

I'm happy to announce I've been promoted to an Apache Arrow Committer, meaning I'm authorized to merge code patches into Arrow repositories!

I join this list of amazing people: arrow.apache.org/committers/

Rendering H3 data with H3HexagonLayer

Maplibre text labels rendered above Lonboard layer

Released Lonboard v0.13!

- New layer types: H3, S2, Geohash, A5 and fixed HeatmapLayer
- Render data layers beneath Maplibre text labels
- Map UI controls: scale, fullscreen, navigation
- Significant performance improvements: fixing earlier regressions

developmentseed.org/lonboard/lat...

latest out from our lab- led by Saurabh Kaushik- we find at least one geofoundational model (just testing Privthi here) is outperforming CNNs and transformers for mapping glaciers (esp. termini and snouts). we released a dataset with >1800 global images with it too! doi.org/10.1016/j.sr...

Say hi at #FOSS4GNA and grab a zine from our table!