Development Seed

We made a Starter Pack of all our team members on Bluesky. Give them a follow to hear about the cool things they are working on. go.bsky.app/Rgbegts

Heading to #SOTMLATAM in Mexico City? Join Dev Seed's Vitor George for "OSM for Cities: Datos abiertos para planificación urbana en América Latina." The session explores how open mapping and open data can support urban planning and decision-making across Latin America. #OpenStreetMap #OpenData

More freedom isn't always better. In our latest blog, we explore how constraints on tools, outputs, and models can improve agentic AI workflows for Earth observation. developmentseed.org/blog/2026-1...

We're at CNG Zürich on Oct. 29! 🎤 Check out Gjore Milevski's lightning talk & live demo, "Exploring a Zarr 3D Cube with SQL in the Browser" at 17:00 CET. Leo Thomas will also be on site for the Geo Embeddings sprint and to connect with the community. 🌍 Hope to see you there! #CloudNativeGeo

Heading to Berlin for Agentic AI for Earth Observation? Join Dev Seed's Soumya Ranjan and Daniel Wiesmann on Oct. 21 for "Small Models, Big Maps: Local Geospatial Workflows with Fine-tuned SLMs." Learn how fine-tuned SLMs can power geospatial workflows and Earth observation applications.

We're heading to Berlin for the Agentic AI for Earth Observation Workshop next week. Looking forward to connecting with the community and discussing the future of geospatial AI, Earth observation, open-source technologies, and cloud-native workflows. See you there! 🌍 #AgenticAI #GeoAI

"The theme I'm always coming back to is data access improvements." From GEDI archives to STAC and interoperable geospatial infrastructure, Henry Rodman is focused on making Earth observation data easier to discover and use. Read the latest Behind the Tech: developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

What actually is an Earth data embedding? Where does it come from, what do all those numbers represent, and what can we do with them? We made an illustrated primer for the GeoAI-curious among us 🧶🌎 Read: ds.io/embeddings-... Visual guide + mini-zine: zines.developmentseed.org

Before he was building cloud infrastructure for geospatial data, Henry Rodman was trying to find the right datasets as a forest scientist. That experience still shapes his work today. Get to know Henry in the latest Behind the Tech 👇 developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0... #Geospatial #OpenData

Today is the reward for a bunch of stuff wrapping up yesterday: working on my STAC Map (forked from @developmentseed.org) for scanned georeferenced maps! It's looking good, but I need to add the recently processed maps and figure out how to add image previews.

The global food system is huge — and mostly invisible. The Global Food Twin shows how calories are produced and move across the world, from regional crops to major transport routes. A new way to see the system we depend on. developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

osm-seed has moved into its own GitHub org and released osm-seed 2.0.0. What started as an internal Development Seed tool is now supporting projects like OpenHistoricalMap, Palestine Open Maps, and local government mapping systems. Read more: ds.io/osm-seed

Anton Donle rebuilt a wildfire CO₂ workflow using openEO — calculating dNBR, classifying vegetation with a UDF, and estimating emissions at 20m, all with server‑side processing. A sharp example of cloud‑native EO’s potential. 🔗 developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

AI for Earth only works end‑to‑end. We build pipelines that clean, train, and deliver insights from real‑world data, including coral monitoring with TNC. Models are one piece; the system makes it useful. 🔗 developmentseed.org/blog/2025-0...

Machine learning on openEO isn’t just preprocessing. Dev Seed intern Anton Donle used UDFs to classify burned vegetation and estimate CO₂ from a Portugal wildfire. Backend quirks, lots of flexibility, and a clear look at cloud‑native EO’s future. 🔗 developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

The Global Food Twin turns a huge food‑system model into an interactive map. Powered by Next.js, PostgreSQL, React Map GL, and deck.gl, it shows how food is produced, moved, and connected to nutrition worldwide. developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

Say hi to @vgeorge.bsky.social in Paris this weekend at State of the Map.

On my way to State of the Map 2026! Sixteen years since my first OSM conference, and it's amazing to see how much the community has grown. I'll be catching up on the latest for @developmentseed.org and presenting the refreshed osmforcities.org on Saturday. Found this 2010 photo with the 🇧🇷 flag 🥲

We tested how far geospatial embeddings can go on their own. Pixelverse experiments show structure, but not enough separation to classify building types, pointing to the value of fusing embeddings with other datasets. More in Groundwork 05 → developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

HEALPix, but in your browser. healpix‑ts + deck.gl‑healpix let you animate and explore global datasets like ERA5 without a notebook. See the experiment in Groundwork 05 → developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

Earth observation data keeps growing, but discovery hasn’t kept pace. Federated STAC collection search is emerging as a way to browse datasets across multiple catalogs in one place, no guessing required. Exciting direction for FAIR‑aligned EO work. developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

Development Seed is at ACCESS 2026 in Melbourne! On Wednesday, our ML Engineer Wei Ji Leong gives a lightning talk on CuPy‑Xarray and how GPU decoding can speed up Earth data workflows. Catch it between 11:30–12:00 on Day 1.

Meet Gjore Milevski, Software Engineer at Development Seed. He works on NASA’s VEDA project and helped build the Mobile Climate Mapper, featured at the Smithsonian’s Earth Information Center. Learn more: developmentseed.org/blog/2025-0...

Zarrista: a new, faster Python library for working with Zarr data! 1.9x to 2.7x faster than Zarr-Python for reading local data. developmentseed.org/zarrista/lat...

Zarrista is a new Rust-powered Python library that speeds up Zarr I/O by 1.9×–2.7× over Zarr-Python. It’s a thin binding to zeros, and it’s header into Zarr-Python itself, so you get speedup with zero code changes. https://latlong.blog/2026/08/zarrista-makes-reading-zarr-1927-faster-in-python.html

Development Seed is everywhere this August — IGARSS, ACCESS Workshop, Responsible Gen‑AI Hackweek, STAC Japan, State of the Map, and FOSS4G. Full details + talks: developmentseed.org/community

Pushing browser‑native raster visualization forward: deck.gl‑raster now handles multi‑band COGs, faster GPU processing, and smarter tile loading, no server required. Check it out in Groundwork 05 → developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

Headed to IGARSS 2026 in DC! Catch Development Seed’s Kevin Bullock in the TU2.R6 session sharing how EO + risk analytics scale together to support better climate and disaster decisions. If you’re in town for the conference, come say hi.

Massive raster collections, but without the pain. lazycogs lets you open huge COG archives as an xarray dataset using STAC Geoparquet—fetching only the pixels you actually need. More in Groundwork 05 → developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

Finding EO data shouldn’t feel like detective work. New federated STAC search tools now make it possible to explore collections across NASA, ESA, and more without knowing the right catalog. A big win for open science. developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

2025 was a big year for open geospatial at Dev Seed. From eoAPI to STAC‑GeoParquet to Zarr experiments and Global Nature Watch, shared tools and shared standards moved the ecosystem forward. Our work in 2026 is closing the last mile. developmentseed.org/blog/2025-1...

New Groundwork dropped. We’ve been playing with: • lazycogs + STAC Geoparquet • deck.gl-raster upgrades • HEALPix animations in the browser • Pixelverse embedding experiments that surprised us It’s messy, experimental, and very us. Check it out → developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

Groundwork 05 is out. We’ve been tinkering with lazycogs, browser‑native HEALPix tools, new deck.gl‑raster updates, and some surprising Pixelverse embedding experiments. If you like open‑source rabbit holes, take a look → developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...

Ian Schuler joined MapScaping to talk about The Great Retooling — cloud‑native geospatial becoming the default, pushed forward by AI. If your data isn’t reachable by agents, it’s not part of the conversation anymore. 🔗 mapscaping.com/podcast/the... #geospatial #cloudnative #opensource #AI

eoAPI makes it easy to stand up STAC metadata, raster tiling, and vector services — no heavy lift. Explore the stack → eoapi.dev And check out our other tools: Titiler, Lonboard, obstore, deck.gl‑raster, stac‑map. Follow our GitHub for more: github.com/development...

EOEPCA isn’t just architecture. It’s open‑source building blocks for real EO platforms. Auth, metadata, processing, interoperability… all production‑ready. Read the blog → developmentseed.org/blog/2026-0...