Ecosystem

The Julia ecosystem for geospatial modeling is maturing very quickly as the result of multiple initiatives such as JuliaEarth, JuliaClimate, and JuliaGeo. Each of these initiatives is associated with a different set of challenges that ultimatively determine the types of packages that are being developed in the corresponding GitHub organizations. In this section, we try to clarify what is available to first-time users of the language.

JuliaEarth

Originally created to host the GeoStats.jl framework, this initiative is primarily concerned with geospatial data science and geostatistical modeling. Due to the various applications in the subsurface of the Earth, most of our Julia packages were developed to work efficiently with both 2D and 3D geometries.

Unlike other initiatives, JuliaEarth is 100% Julia by design. This means that we do not rely on external libraries such as GDAL or Proj4 for geospatial work.

JuliaClimate

The most recent of the three initiatives, JuliaClimate has been created to address specific challenges in climate modeling. One of these challenges is access to climate data in Julia. Packages such as INMET.jl and CDSAPI.jl serve this purpose and are quite nice to work with.

JuliaGeo

Focused on bringing well-established external libraries to Julia, JuliaGeo provides packages that are widely used by geospatial communities from other programming languages. GDAL.jl, Proj4.jl and LibGEOS.jl are good examples of such packages.