EDOPS is a FastAPI service that delivers structured environmental signatures for any terrestrial location on Earth. A signature summarizes the environmental character of one or more drainage basins — those containing a given point, or those falling within a given area (polity, region, neighborhood). Signature variables are drawn from the HydroATLAS datasets, together with temporal layers for paleoclimate, land-use history, and volcanic forcing.
The service is designed to be generally useful for spatial humanities research: signature-based comparisons across historical places, environmental context for gazetteers, and exploratory analysis of environment–culture relationships.
EDOPS is a work in progress. A preliminary v0.4 of the platform is live at edops.computingplace.org.
Signatures can include variables from any requested combination of persistence bands — groupings that give some temporal scoping apart from the explicitly temporal reconstructions in Band T.
| Band | Content |
|---|---|
| A | Physiographic bedrock: elevation, slope, relief, lithology, karst. Stable over geological time. |
| B | Hydro-climatic baselines: river discharge, runoff, groundwater, soils, wetlands (full upstream catchment). |
| C | Bioclimatic proxies: temperature, precipitation, aridity, biome, ecoregion (contemporary baseline; Band T supersedes for period-specific queries). |
| D | Anthropocene markers: population density, cropland, human footprint, GDP (present-day only — exclude for pre-modern analyses). |
| E | Coastality: distance to marine outlet, endorheic flag, outlet type. |
| T | Temporal: LMR v2.1 paleoclimate · HYDE 3.4 land-use · eVolv2k v4 volcanic forcing. |
- Web — edops.computingplace.org: three interactive pages — Sandbox, Workbench, Data Explorer.
- Documentation — edops.computingplace.org/docs: page guides, a generated variable Codebook, the API Guide, and data-source notes. The single source of truth for what the pages and variables do — not duplicated here.
- API —
GET /api/signature?lat=…&lon=…with optionalbands=ABCDET,from_year/to_year(0–1998 CE, required with Band T),level=6|8. Areal queries atGET /api/areaandGET /api/areas. Interactive schema at/api/schema; full reference at /docs/api.
Areal signatures — signatures now compute over regions, not just points. Circular buffers, basin-ring neighborhoods, and arbitrary polygons (historical polities, custom study areas) all aggregate to the same signature shape, with area-weighted scoring and coherence diagnostics (concentrated/spread/split). New endpoints: GET /api/area, GET /api/areas.
Sandbox, rebuilt — a two-tab interface replaces the original Lookup page: Settlements (place search → basin signature) and Polities (search → historical boundary with a time-slice slider), both backed by an environmental similarity instrument.
Workbench (new) — a page for testing correspondence between environment and culture: 1,291 D-PLACE societies (subsistence, religion, isolates analysis), an exploration of one regionalization (see African Regions below), 258 World Heritage Cities with both environmental and text-based (Wikipedia) similarity search, and an OneEarth ecoregion browser.
African Regions (new) — a dedicated map tab for pre-colonial African subregions (Lovejoy et al. 2021), with environmental variable painting, a D-PLACE society overlay, and a per-region signature with an automated environmental-distinctiveness summary.
Documentation site — a full MkDocs site at /docs, with a variable Codebook and API Guide generated directly from the live catalog and route definitions, plus an interactive API explorer at /api/schema.
Everywhere else — unified navigation across all pages and a broad legibility/UX pass.
- Backend: Python 3.12 · FastAPI · PostgreSQL 17 + PostGIS · psycopg3
- Frontend: MapLibre GL JS · PMTiles · Bootstrap 5 · Vanilla JS
- Data: HydroATLAS / BasinATLAS · LMR v2.1 · HYDE 3.4 · eVolv2k v4 · OneEarth ecoregions
EDOPS is the environmental component of Computing Place (CEDOP), a spatial-humanities initiative exploring the environmental and cultural dimensions of place. v0.4 completes the areal-signature work — points, buffers, basin rings, and polity/region boundaries all resolve to the same signature. Current work explores correspondence between environmental signatures and cultural patterns (D-PLACE, Seshat, Cliopatria), a pilot feature on the Workbench page.
Karl Grossner · kgeographer.org