Release notes

Release notes#

Below are the release notes for all minor versions and the historical roadmap to a first major version.

0.3.0#

GeoUtils version 0.3 is the third minor release since the creation of the project, and essentially a pre-1.0 given that most envisioned features are now both operational and fairly mature.

This release finally brings the scalability work developed along many years to the public API, and restructures the package to allow operators and neighborhoods to be used consistently across operations. Sampling, statistics, filters and uncertainty features are expanded or added, with a large part migrated and refactored from code developed in xDEM. Together, these allow for more composability between operators, with experimental support for weights and uncertainty propagation.

More specifically, GeoUtils 0.3 adds:

  • Xarray and GeoPandas accessors rst, pc and vct for working natively with raster and point cloud DataArrays and Datasets, and vector and point cloud GeoDataFrames,

  • Scalable chunked execution support through Dask and multiprocessing to nearly all operations, with recently added plotting, cosampling, grouped statistics and variography, all benchmarked and profiling tools,

  • Reusable interpolators and reducers with configurable neighborhoods, fractional coverage, rules for missing data and custom definitions, expanding raster resampling, point filtering and gridding, and statistics,

  • Experimental support for weights and uncertainty propagation, including error model estimation, covariance-aware calculations, analytical and numerical propagation, kriging and random field simulation,

  • Chunked point cloud I/O directly with LAS/LAZ/COPC and GeoParquet readers (through LasPy and PyArrow).

Several methods and arguments have been renamed to ensure consistency across objects. The previous names still work but will be deprecated:

  • interp_points() and reduce_points() are renamed into interp_at_points() and reduce_at_points(), respectively,

  • get_nanarray() is renamed into to_nanarray(),

  • bounds is renamed into bbox, and get_bounds_projected() into get_bbox_projected(),

  • Use data_name instead of data_column for the active data variable of a point cloud,

  • Use Vector.gdf instead of Vector.ds for the underlying GeoDataFrame,

  • For raster filtering and point gridding, use engine= instead backend=. Also rename size= to window= for raster filtering, and dist_nodata_pixel= to radius= for point gridding.

  • The clip functionality has been moved to its own function, with crop() only working on rectangular extents to ensure deferred I/O.

Additionally, a few methods have changed default output type, such as subsample that now returns a point cloud object. Use as_array to return an array instead, as before. Finally, several methods do not accept the inplace argument anymore, such as crop, to ensure more seamless Dask graph building through Xarray. Use ds = ds.crop() instead.

0.2.0#

GeoUtils version 0.2 is the second minor release since the creation of the project. It is the result of months of work to consolidate the point cloud features towards a stable API that interfaces well with other objects. Parallel work on scalability with Dask and Multiprocessing is ongoing, and should soon be released in a 0.3.

GeoUtils 0.2 adds:

  • A point cloud object with its own specific methods (e.g, gridding), that can be used as match-reference for other operations (e.g., interpolating at points), and supports arithmetic (e.g., indexing, NumPy stats) and geometric (e.g., masking) functionalities with the same API as for Raster objects,

  • Preliminary statistics features common to rasters and point clouds, which will be expanded with binning and spatial statistics.

A few changes might be required to adapt from previous versions:

  • Specify Raster.interp_points(as_array=True) to mirror the previous behaviour of returning a 1D array of interpolated values, otherwise now returns a point cloud by default.

  • The Mask class is deprecated in favor of Raster(is_mask=True) to declare a boolean-type Raster, but should keep working until 0.3.

0.1.0#

GeoUtils version 0.1 is the first minor release since the creation of the project in 2020. It is the result of years of work to consolidate and re-structure features into a mature and stable API to minimize future breaking changes.

All the core features drafted at the start of the project are now supported, and there is a clear roadmap towards a first major release 1.0. This minor release also adds many tests and improves significantly the documentation from the early-development state of the package.

The re-structuring created some breaking changes, though minor.

See details below, including a guide to help migrate code from early-development versions.

Features#

GeoUtils now gathers the following core features:

  • Geospatial data objects core to quantitative analysis, which are rasters, vectors and point cloud (preliminary) functionalities,

  • Referencing and transformations using a consistent API with match-reference functionalities,

  • Raster–vector–point interface to interface between the core objects, including rasterize and polygonize, interpolate and grid, and conversions,

  • Distance operations for all objects.

Migrate from early versions#

The following changes might be required to solve breaking changes, depending on your early-development version:

  • Rename .show() to .plot() for all data objects,

  • Rename .dtypes to dtype for Raster objects,

  • Operations .crop(), shift() and to_vcrs() are not done in-place by default anymore, replace by rst = rst.crop() or rst.crop(..., inplace=True) to mirror the old default behaviour,

  • Rename .shift() to .translate() for Raster objects,

  • Several function arguments are renamed, in particular dst_xxx arguments of .reproject() are all renamed to xxx e.g. dst_crs to crs,

  • New user warnings are sometimes raised, in particular if some metadata is not properly defined such as .nodata. Those should give an indication as how to silence them.

Historical roadmap to 1.0#

The following roadmap accompanied the 0.1 release:

Releases of 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, etc, for the following planned additions:

  • The addition of a point cloud PointCloud data object, inherited from the Vector object alongside many features at the interface of point and raster,

  • The addition of a Xarray accessor rst mirroring the Raster object, to work natively with Xarray objects and add support on out-of-memory Dask operations for most of GeoUtils’ features,

  • The addition of a GeoPandas accessor pc mirroring the PointCloud object, to work natively with GeoPandas objects,

  • The addition of statistical features including zonal statistics (e.g., statistics per vector geometry), grouped statistics (e.g., binning with other variables) and spatial statistics (variogram and kriging) through optional dependencies.

  • The addition of filtering and gap-filling features natively robust to nodata and working similarly for all type of geospatial objects.

Release of 1.0 once all these additions are fully implemented, and after feedback from the community.