The SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification celebrated its fifth birthday in May. A key part of STAC’s adoption story is its robust, community-supported ecosystem of software and applications, with clients and APIs written in a variety of languages. Without a single company or entity driving development, STAC software advances and maintenance have been a story of self-organization, individual initiative, and collaboration.

The STAC software ecosystem can be complex and hard-to-navigate, especially to newcomers. In this talk, we’ll walk you through the key software repositories and applications, with a focus on practical demonstrations and use-cases.

There’s been some advances over the last year that we’ll highlight:

• Better tooling and support for stac-geoparquet
• In-browser visualization advances in stac-browser and stac-map
• A major update to the core Python STAC software package, PySTAC v2.0, including obstore support, cleaner read-write semantics, and better extension hooks

We’ll also talk about plans for the coming year, and provide pointers on places where you or your organization can plug in!