links-ads/fabdem-v12

FABDEM v1.2 STAC Catalog

The rasters have moved. This repository now holds the STAC metadata only. The GeoTIFFs live in the public bucket `links-ads/fabdem`, and every STAC item here points at them, so nothing changes for STAC clients. What does change: hf download links-ads/fabdem-v12 no longer gives you the tiles — see Accessing the data.

FABDEM (Forest And Buildings removed Copernicus DEM) is a global 30 m elevation dataset derived from Copernicus GLO-30, with forest and building height biases systematically removed by the University of Bristol. It represents bare-earth topography, which matters for hydrological modelling, flood risk, and any application where vegetation and built structures corrupt the terrain signal.

Dataset summary

The tiles were rewritten from the University of Bristol distribution into valid COGs with internal overview pyramids. Pixel values are unchanged — the rewrite touched only the container, so low-zoom and windowed reads no longer require pulling whole files.

Structure

catalog.json                   root catalog -> collection.json
collection.json                collection "fabdem", 19011 item links
stac_catalog/<id>/<id>.json    one STAC item per tile

Item links hang off the collection, not the catalog, so a client walking rel: item links must read collection.json.

Links inside the catalog are relative, which makes this tree a relative published catalog: the identical documents are also published in the bucket at <https://huggingface.co/buckets/links-ads/fabdem/resolve/>. Use whichever you prefer — this repo's CDN is faster for small documents, the bucket has no per-IP rate ceiling and is the better choice for automated traversal.

Accessing the data

Assets are plain public HTTPS objects, no authentication, readable by GDAL through /vsicurl/:

import rasterio

url = "https://huggingface.co/buckets/links-ads/fabdem/resolve/tiles/N40E000-N50E010_FABDEM_V1-2/N44E007_FABDEM_V1-2.tif"
with rasterio.open("/vsicurl/" + url) as src:
    print(src.profile["dtype"], src.shape, src.overviews(1))
    preview = src.read(1, out_shape=(1, 450, 450))  # reads an overview, not the full grid

stac_catalog_query.ipynb in this repo shows the full path: read the collection, filter tiles by area of interest, load only the matching items, and stack them with stackstac.

Limitations

• —Temporal snapshot: represents conditions circa 2020.
• —Processing artifacts: some remain in complex terrain.
• —Polar regions: coverage follows Copernicus DEM constraints.

Licence and attribution

FABDEM v1.2 is distributed under the Non-Commercial Government Licence v2.0 — see license.txt. Non-commercial use only; keep the licence alongside any redistribution.

Produced by the University of Bristol (<https://data.bris.ac.uk/data/dataset/s5hqmjcdj8yo2ibzi9b4ew3sn>), from Copernicus GLO-30 © ESA. Reprocessed and hosted by Fondazione LINKS — AI, Data & Space.

The original STAC cataloguing approach was inspired by <https://github.com/cordmaur/fabdem-brazil-south>.

Citation

Hawker, L., Uhe, P., Paulo, L., Sosa, J., Savage, J., Sampson, C., and Neal, J. (2022). "A 30 m Global Map of Elevation with Forests and Buildings Removed." Environmental Research Letters 17(2), 024016. <https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4d4f>