Introducing Stand’s Public STAC Catalog
At Stand, the advanced models we build depend on a deep ecosystem of publicly available environmental data. We aggregate, clean, and centralize these datasets as part of our internal workflows - now we’re preparing to share that infrastructure more broadly.
The Climate Data Common program is about leveraging our work to support the broader research and nonprofit ecosystem by improving usability, and ensuring long-term access to these vital resources. With that specific goal in mind, our first release of data on the Commons makes use of a STAC catalog, for standardized and scalable access.
You can explore the catalog directly here:
👉 STAC Browser for Climate Data Commons
What’s a STAC Catalog?
The SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) is a specification for organizing geospatial data in a standardized, machine-readable way. It’s designed to make large collections of imagery, raster, and other spatial assets easy to discover, explore, and use - whether through code or a web interface.
By exposing our datasets in STAC format, we enable:
Open access to metadata and file locations
Simplified integration into geospatial workflows (e.g., using
pystac)Searchability by region, time, or data type
What’s In Our Catalog?
This is just the start - but here’s what you’ll currently find:
Fuel and topography layers from LANDFIRE
Burn probability and conditional flame length distributions from FSim
Geographic boundaries and buildings
Topography-derived data at finer resolution
Each item includes standard metadata like bounding boxes, timestamps, and links to cloud-hosted assets in accessible formats (.gpkg, COG, etc).
What’s Next
This catalog is just getting started. In the coming months, we’ll be adding:
More open source data that is historically difficult to work with, like USGS fine resolution DEM
Datasets based on your feedback!
Our goal is to make it easy to use rich spatial data without infrastructure hurdles!
Feedback
If you have new ideas or components you would like to see included in the Data Commons - or would like to help contribute to building, we’d love to hear from you! Please reach out at datacommons@standinsurance.com.
