High-performance Python STAC tooling, backed by Rust

The SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification is an open, community-developed specification that enables large-scale, distributed search and discovery of geospatial assets. Part of the success of STAC has been due to its community-built tooling, written mostly in Python and Javascript, that was developed in tandem with the specification itself. As the specification and its usages have matured, we’ve seen the need to improve the software tooling ecosystem both through direct feature work on the existing libraries and by creating new libraries to cover new use-cases. In this talk, I’ll walk through the existing Python STAC ecosystem and showcase new developments, including stac-geoparquet innovations, STAC API queries using DuckDB, and cloud-storage-agnostic access for STAC and its assets. Much of this new tooling is written in Rust and exposed with Python bindings, so I’ll talk a bit about how that works, the benefits, and the drawbacks. Finally, I’ll make some not-so-bold predictions on where I think the STAC ecosystem might be headed in the next few years, and talk a bit about the relationship between STAC and other open specifications that are heavily used in the scientific geospatial community, specifically Zarr. Slides available at https://www.gadom.ski/2025-02-05-PangeoShowcase/.