MTD Geospatial Data Center

Crawling LidarHD tiles

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0200

In this post we show how to search and visualize IGN’s LidarHD tiles using the STAC browser in a navigator.

What is Lidar-HD?

As part of the national LiDAR HD program, IGN produces and distributes 3D LiDAR maps of the whole of France’s soil and subsoil. The data disseminated includes raw or classified point clouds and 3D digital models (MNT, MNS, MNH, etc.). The 3D point clouds acquired as part of the LiDAR HD program are first classified into several classes (soil, water, vegetation, buildings, bridges, perennial overburden) and then give rise to the production of DTMs (digital terrain models), DSMs (digital surface models) and DHMs (digital height models). All acquisitions and productions are spread over 5 years according to the priority needs expressed by the project’s national and local sponsors and their uses.

Thematics

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0200

We cover various thematics such as forestry, agriculture, soils, land cover mapping and southern countries.

THEIA-MTD Center for Data and Services (CDS)

Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

MTD’s geospatial data infrasctructure is used by the THEIA-MTD Data and Services Center (CDS), as one of its four national data centers (Toulouse, Strasbourg, Grenoble and Montpellier). Our infrastructure provides services the THEIA, of which:

End-to-end daily production from remote sensing images,
STAC catalogs for THEIA products,
Authentication mechanisms,
OGC compliant services to access and vizualise the geospatial data.

Browse the CDS THEIA STAC API and the CDS THEIA STAC Browser!

THEIA missions

THEIA is the land surface data and services hub of the Data Terra research infrastructure. It facilitates access to environmental data and federates scientific expertise on a national scale around five major themes:

Organization

Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Governance

Our project is lead by INRAE (French institute of research in agriculture, food and environment) and IRD (French institute of research and development).

The MTD geospatial data infrastructure has been developed at La maison de la télédétection by people from UMR TETIS, UMR Espace-Dev and UAR Data-Terra.

Partners

Our partners include the TETIS and Espace-Dev research labs, the ISDM (data science institute of Montpellier, France) and the CROCc (Occitanie research cloud initiative, located in Montpellier, France), the DiPSO (department for open and reproducible science from INRAE), and Data-Terra (french research infrastructure).

STAC in QGIS

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0100

QGIS is a powerful and popular geographic information system software. Among its so-called extensions, STAC API Browser offers to browse any STAC endpoint with ease, and use directly the geospatial data into QGIS.

In this video, we perform some searches in the STAC catalog using the STAC browser plugin. Then we manipulate STAC assets in full resolution (S1 images, S2 images, buildings footprints product) without downloading anything: raster files are in Cloud-Optimized-Geotiff format, streamed through HTTP, read on-the-fly by QGIS.

CEOS demonstrator

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Forests, which span approximately 30% of the Earth’s land surface, play a crucial role in sustaining life and regulating the climate by acting as natural carbon sinks. However, they are often undervalued, increasing their susceptibility to deforestation and degradation, which causes approximately ten percent of global warming. Forest cover continues to decline globally, with 28.3 million hectares lost in 2023. The tropics in particular lost 11.1 million hectares of tree cover according to the Global Forest Watch. Tropical forests are of particular significance as they represent 96% of the world’s deforestation, which has massive impacts on biodiversity and carbon storage.

Services overview

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Technologies

We rely on the Spatio Temporal Assets Catalogs to build interoperable and understandable catalogs of geospatial products. We deliver geospatial images in the Cloud Optimized Geotiff format, which enables an unprecedent ease of use remotely. Our infrastructure is cloud-native, and is currently hosted at ISDM.

Services

STAC

Our STAC API delivers production from raw remote sensing images (Sentinel-2, Sentinel-1, Spot-6/7, etc) to value-added products on thematics such as Forest, Soil, Agriculture, Land-cover mapping, etc. Most of the published items are automatically produced by processing chains. Our API also offers the possiblity to any authenticated users of Data-Terra to publish their data.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About Us

THEIA-MTD Geospatial Data Center, located in Montpellier, Fr.

Contact

Open an issue on the project hosted at INRAE’s gitlab.

Our SDK 🔧

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Python or CLI

teledetection is a Python SDK (Software Development Kit) to interact with our servers. It can be used in command-line or used as a dependency.

Installation

Your can install our SDK from pip:

pip install teledetection

Usage

Once the environment setup:

import teledetection as tld
import pystac_client

api = pystac_client.Client.open(
   'https://api.stac.teledetection.fr',
   modifier=tld.sign_inplace,
)

Authentification

There are 2 different ways of authentificating on our servers during a development:

Method	Generation method	Duration	Usage
OAuth2	By `teledetection`	Temporary (5 days, renewed when `sign_inplace` is called), `teledetection` asks to reauthentificate after expiration	When using `teledetection` on Python
API Key	- By `tld` (binary provided with `teledetection`) - On our Gate website	Permanent

Examples

To see how to play with our library, check our Jupyter notebooks examples

Upload data

Our SDK also enables to push data on our database. For this, check teledetection’s documentation.