2026-09-02 –, Ran1
Cloud Native Geospatial formats like FlatGeobuf and GeoParquet allow applications to access geospatial data directly from an object store with no API server maintenance. This session will explain how the Geoconnex project has leveraged such formats to improve the user experience of analyzing hydrological information across the United States.
Many organizations want to share their data in a web accessible way, but do not have sufficient time to maintain APIs. Additionally, generating subsets of data for web access can easily become out of sync. Cloud native geospatial formats like FlatGeobuf and GeoParquet help to solve this by allowing for data access via object storage http range requests and skipping the need for database or server maintenance. This talk will reference how the Geoconnex project, funded by the US Geological Survey, has used FlatGeobuf for storing data pertaining to all hydrologic catchments and mainstem rivers in the entire United States. This has allowed the project to use the same exact file for both internal microservices and frontend applications. Additionally, we will demonstrate how Geoconnex has used GeoParquet to allow for efficient geospatial queries across the entire United States, directly from the browser. These formats have helped to reduce the workload of maintaining data and improve the user experience for end users.
Information on the FlatGeobuf spec can be found at https://flatgeobuf.org/
Information on the GeoParquet spec can be found at https://geoparquet.org/
Information on the Geoconnex system which uses such formats to improve water data access can be found at https://docs.geoconnex.us/
This talk will briefly summarize the FlatGeobuf and GeoParquet standards. It will then reference the client libraries used for querying them such as hyparquet, and their integration with mainstream geospatial tooling like GeoPandas and MapLibre.
I make my conference contribution available under the CC BY 4.0 license. The conference contribution comprises the abstract, the text contribution for the conference proceedings, the presentation materials as well as the video recording and live transmission of the presentation:
Colton is a software engineer for the Center for Geospatial Solutions at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge Massachusetts, USA. He works on a variety of backend and data engineering tasks related to water data.