Yirgacheffe: A Declarative Approach to Geospatial Data

Michael Dales presents Yirgacheffe, a declarative geospatial library that allows spatial algorithms to be implemented concisely, supports parallel execution, and avoids common errors by automatically handling data (large geospatial rasters) and resources (cores, memory, GPUs). Our primary user domain comprises ecologists, where a typical problem involves cleaning messy occurrence data, overlaying it over tiled rasters, combining layers, and deriving actionable insights from the results. We describe the successes of this approach towards driving key pipelines related to global biodiversity and describe the capability gaps that remain, hoping to motivate more research into geospatial domain-specific languages.

Our new paper in Biological Conservation demonstrates how the LIFE extinction risk metric can be applied across five diverse case studies, from real-time tropical deforestation monitoring to evaluating conservation project effectiveness.

Design principles for collective knowledge systems—permanence, provenance, permission, and placement—that enable robust networks for evidence-based decision making.

Report on second Programming for the Planet workshop featuring papers on climate modeling, geospatial computation and planetary-scale collaborative systems.