Catalog search

The Add Terrain and Add Basemap dialogs take a URL, or recognise one. When there is no URL yet, their search tabs look one up: a STAC catalog for scenes and DEMs over the view, and for basemaps the two big registries of public map services. What a search found keeps its provenance in Source info. The historical catalogs (post-crisis imagery, national archives, old maps) are a different thing: they feed the timeline and are listed on Historical sources.

STAC searchCopy Anchor Link

A tab in both the Add Terrain and Add Basemap dialogs.

STAC is the standard index for cloud-native imagery and elevation. This tab searches a catalog for scenes over your current view and adds the COG assets it finds as sources, with no download step.

Seventeen presets ship, grouped by what they hold:

Or paste any catalog URL: a .json is crawled as a static catalog, anything else is treated as a STAC API.

Planet Data API is the one catalog behind a login. Its STAC (api.planet.com/x/data) takes an OpenID access token, not the API key: pip install planet, planet auth login, then paste the output of planet auth print-access-token under Settings → API Keys → Planet access token (it lasts about 2 h 20). Planet's items carry only a thumbnail, so a scene is added as XYZ tiles from tiles.planet.com, signed with your Planet API key (the other field). What a search returns depends on the account's plan.

The same list is also in the Library, under Catalogs — a catalog cannot be "added" the way a single dataset URL can, so its row offers Browse, which closes the Library and opens this tab with that endpoint already selected. That is the entry point worth remembering: the Library is where you look for data, and per-scene DEMs (EarthDEM strips, ArcticDEM strips, OpenTopography's rasters) only exist behind a search.

Each catalog row also has a +/−, which decides whether that endpoint is offered in the search's own picker at all — so a list you never use can be trimmed to the handful you do. The choice is remembered, and it is stored as the exclusions, so a catalog added in a later release turns up rather than being silently absent.

What the panel does for you:

• Two access shapes, one UI. A STAC API is paged through its /search endpoint with bbox and datetime; a static catalog has no search, so its child links are crawled breadth-first and filtered to the view. Static crawls of deeply nested archives (Umbra's year-nested tree, for instance) are slow by nature — the progress line says where it is.
• Filters — date range, current view only, cloud cover.
• Web Mercator first. Assets already in EPSG:3857 sort ahead of the rest, because they load directly; anything else is pinned to titiler automatically rather than failing quietly.
• Terrain is filtered to single-band elevation rasters, so the terrain dialog does not offer you an RGB quicklook as a DEM.
• Collections offering a xyz web-map-link can be added as a tile source directly, without picking an item at all.

Your last catalog, collection and filters are remembered per target, so reopening the tab resumes where you left off.

Terrain Viewer's own sources, as STACCopy Anchor Link

The other way round: every source the app knows is published as a static STAC catalog at /docs/stac/catalog.json. Open it in STAC Map or STAC Browser (the file is served with CORS, in production by GitHub Pages and in development by the Vite proxy). Eight collections:

• terrain-builtin: the global elevation tiles (Mapterhorn, Mapbox, MapTiler, AWS, Esri, Cesium), each link carrying its tile encoding and whether it needs a key.
• terrain-library and basemap-library: the libraries, with their declared footprints and native resolution (gsd); COGs as assets, tile services as web-map links.
• historical-imagery: the timeline's own sources (Wayback, Google Earth Historical, Bing, Planet, EOX, HLS), one item each spanning its archive.
• eli: every layer of the OSM Editor Layer Index (about 1,750) with its coverage polygon and capture dates where it has them.
• ign-historical: every dated IGN Géoplateforme layer (about 140), with WMTS and tile links.
• national-historical: the regional year series on the timeline (about 330 layers: Catalonia, Spain, NRW, Wallonia, Flanders, the Netherlands, Vienna, Luxembourg, Hamburg, Bavaria, Tyrol, Japan, New York City, 1953 East Germany, Landsat WELD).
• timeline-catalogs: the catalogs searched per view (HOT STAC, Planet disaster data, Map Warper, Wikimaps, USGS topo, ArcGIS Online, swisstopo, QMS, Allmaps), linked rather than copied; the two STAC ones are children a client can follow.

Tile services use the web-map-links extension (xyz, wms, wmts); each item also links back to the app at its place. Items without a date carry an open time range and terrain-viewer:undated. The catalog is rebuilt by the docs build (pnpm run stac by hand). QMS and Allmaps could later be served as live STAC through a small proxy that turns a STAC search into their own queries.

Basemap catalog searchCopy Anchor Link

Two more tabs of the Add Basemap dialog, for imagery rather than elevation.

NextGIS QMS — searches qms.nextgis.com, a community index of public map services. Only tms and wms entries can become a MapLibre raster source directly, so those are what the list shows; each result carries its zoom range and a permalink into the QMS browser.

OSM Editor Layer Index — the imagery catalog behind iD, JOSM and Rapid: roughly 1,500 aerial, map and historic sources, most of them national or regional agency services with their licence recorded. It ships bundled (bumped weekly) rather than fetched, so it works offline and cannot break when an upstream index moves.

• Filter by text, by category (aerial, map, historic map, OSM-based, historic aerial, QA, elevation), or to layers covering the current view.
• "Best" layers are starred, as the OSM editors mark them.
• Licence and attribution follow the layer into Sources Coverage, along with a permalink to the index entry.
• An entry's real coverage polygon — not a bounding box — can be drawn as a coverage overlay.

An index entry declares whether it is a basemap or an overlay, and that role is honoured on add: an overlay-role layer joins the overlay list rather than silently replacing your basemap.