Data sources & downloads

Nothing here is about analysis. It is about the half of the job that happens before a GeoDataFrame exists: finding a source that covers your area, getting it out without being rate-limited, and knowing what you are allowed to do with it afterwards.

The four routes below behave very differently. An Overpass query is a text query against a live database that will time out on you. A WFS is paged, and the page size is the server’s choice, not yours. A STAC search returns scene metadata, and the pixels come later. A geocoder returns a coordinate whether or not it found your address. What they share is that the download is the easy part and the licence, the extent and the CRS are the part that decides whether the data is usable.

The concepts below cover where spatial data actually comes from and what each kind of source is for; the how-to guides are one per source; and the fixes are the failures that arrive at scale — throttling, truncation and partial downloads that look complete.

Learning paths run through this topic too — see the end of this page.