# State of GIS package ecosystem?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864>\
**Category:** Geo\
**Created:** [March 14, 2019, 1:20pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864 "2019-03-14T13:20:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 12\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nickeubank](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/nickeubank/32/3878_2.png) [@nickeubank](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nickeubank)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2019, 1:20pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/1 "2019-03-14T13:20:01Z")

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I’m looking to move as much of my workflow as I can into julia from R/Python, and was hoping to get a sense of what the Julia GIS ecosystem looks like (especially for vector data).

Has Julia developed anything like `sp` in R or `shapely`/`geopandas` in Python?

(last state of the ecosystem post is a couple years old)

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**Author:** ![yeesian](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/yeesian/32/652_2.png) [@yeesian](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/yeesian)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2019, 1:35pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/2 "2019-03-14T13:35:01Z")

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To my knowledge, the closest thing to shapely is [LibGEOS.jl](https://github.com/JuliaGeo/LibGEOS.jl) and the closest thing to fiona+rasterio is [ArchGDAL.jl](https://github.com/yeesian/ArchGDAL.jl)

I am still [in the midst of designing a more user-friendly API](https://github.com/yeesian/ArchGDAL.jl/pull/76), but if you’re looking to get started now, [Andrew](https://twitter.com/map_andrew) has started a series of posts on using ArchGDAL: [GitHub - acgeospatial/Julia\_Geospatial: Examples for a blog series on Geospatial Julia using ArchGDAL](https://github.com/acgeospatial/Julia_Geospatial)

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**Author:** ![SimonW](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/34f0e0/32.png) [@SimonW](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/SimonW)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 1:14pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/3 "2019-03-31T13:14:08Z")

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Hi,

I experimented a lot with traditional GIS APIs (e.g. [QGIS](https://www.qgis.org/en/site/), [GRASS](https://grass.osgeo.org/), [SAGA](http://saga-gis.sourceforge.net/en/)) to get them work with Julia. They cover much more than native R and Python packages and have fairly usable APIs. I didn’t managed to get it working flawlessly using the Python APIs, especially without reducing a lot of memory. What I can recommend is to use SAGA’s C API as much as possible for all kind of analyses (raster and vector).

BTW have a look at [GeoStats.jl](https://github.com/juliohm/GeoStats.jl). It certainly offers some nice features for Kriging but is still less complete than what is accessible via the SAGA C API.

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**Author:** ![yeesian](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/yeesian/32/652_2.png) [@yeesian](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/yeesian)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 7:45pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/4 "2019-03-31T19:45:43Z")

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> [@SimonW](#):
>
> What I can recommend is to use SAGA’s C API as much as possible for all kind of analyses (raster and vector).

Can you elaborate on this? I have not heard of SAGA before, and it seems like they use Proj4 and GDAL under the hood, so I’m interested to learn more about it. Where should users go looking for documentation and examples, etc

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**Author:** ![juliohm](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/juliohm/32/215266_2.png) [@juliohm](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/juliohm)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 10:33pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/5 "2019-03-31T22:33:04Z")

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Thank you @SimonW for sharing GeoStats.jl. Could you please elaborate on what you think would be a good addition? Maybe open a feature request? Like @yeesian I am not familiar with the SAGA project.

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**Author:** ![joa-quim](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/joa-quim/32/227_2.png) [@joa-quim](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/joa-quim)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 10:41pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/6 "2019-03-31T22:41:23Z")

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> [@SimonW](#):
>
> What I can recommend is to use SAGA’s C API as much as possible for all kind of analyses (raster and vector).

[Saga](http://saga-gis.org/en/index.html) is a C++ project. Didn’t know it has a C API. Where are the docs?

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**Author:** ![datnamer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/datnamer/32/3471_2.png) [@datnamer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/datnamer)\
**Post date:** [April 2, 2019, 2:17am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/7 "2019-04-02T02:17:38Z")

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Here’s a pretty extensive python lib for/geostats GIS [http://pysal.org/](http://pysal.org/)

Might be some ideas in there.

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**Author:** ![juliohm](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/juliohm/32/215266_2.png) [@juliohm](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/juliohm)\
**Post date:** [April 2, 2019, 2:33am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/8 "2019-04-02T02:33:30Z")

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@datnamer thanks for sharing. Strictly speaking, PySAL is not a geostatistics library. The same could be said about many other GIS packages out there.

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**Author:** ![datnamer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/datnamer/32/3471_2.png) [@datnamer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/datnamer)\
**Post date:** [April 2, 2019, 12:55pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/9 "2019-04-02T12:55:19Z")

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Sure, but it has a pretty large geostats component, was my impression.

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**Author:** ![juliohm](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/juliohm/32/215266_2.png) [@juliohm](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/juliohm)\
**Post date:** [April 2, 2019, 1:02pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/10 "2019-04-02T13:02:55Z")

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Hi @datnamer you mean the PySAL model in this page? [http://pysal.org/documentation](http://pysal.org/documentation)

If there is more than that, please let me know.

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**Author:** ![datnamer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/datnamer/32/3471_2.png) [@datnamer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/datnamer)\
**Post date:** [April 3, 2019, 10:46am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/11 "2019-04-03T10:46:52Z")

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I guess so. I don’t know much about geostats, so I take it that isn’t quite extensive?

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**Author:** ![juliohm](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/juliohm/32/215266_2.png) [@juliohm](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/juliohm)\
**Post date:** [April 3, 2019, 11:39am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-gis-package-ecosystem/21864/12 "2019-04-03T11:39:17Z")

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Yes, geostats is a lot more 👍 🙂