envoi: Automated feature extraction from environmental data sources for ecological and spatial analysis
Version 1 (latest version)
Record description
- Title
- envoi: Automated feature extraction from environmental data sources for ecological and spatial analysis
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.82595/scilifelab.et04e-2x897
- Description
- Ecological and biogeographic analyses built on biodiversity data most often need a second, critical ingredient: environmental context. To model a species' distribution or climatic niche, or to understand which environmental factors shape biodiversity, it is necessary to compile environmental variables such as elevation, temperature and land cover for each occurrence record. This can be a slow and error-prone task: stitching together datasets from various sources with GIS, R, or Python, making reprojections to get distances right, and aligning outputs that don't share the same format, resolution, or structure. Here we present envoi, an open-source tool that replaces this fragmented workflow with a single unified interface as an easy-to-use web application. The user simply inputs a table of occurrence points in Darwin Core format and a short configuration describing what information to extract. envoi returns either an output table with spatial summary statistics of the selected environmental variables, or analysis-ready raster tiles for each location. At present, the envoi web application currently supports data extraction from Google Earth Engine (GEE). The package contains a built-in catalog of nearly 100 environmental variables sourced from 26 globally available datasets. These span terrain, climate, land cover and land use, vegetation indices and surface-reflectance bands, primary productivity and biomass, and human impacts, with more data sources and providers in the pipeline. By removing the technical hurdle of environmental data collection for biodiversity data, envoi lets users spend their time on analysis rather than stitching together geospatial data from multiple sources. The web application are designed so that a first-year student as well as a seasoned ecologist can produce the same output, lowering the barrier for biodiversity analysis for users. envoi is developed at the Biodiversity Data Lab, Uppsala University.
- Subjects and keywords
- Ecology Biodiversity environmental data remote sensing geographic information system earth observation
- URL
- https://envoi.serve.scilifelab.se
- Source code
- https://github.com/BiodiversityDataLab/envoi
- Docker image
- ghcr.io/biodiversitydatalab/envoi-webapp:0.2.2-bc90d03
- Date submitted
- 2026-10-19 11:32
- Date updated
- 2026-10-28 08:39
- Date available
- 2026-10-28 08:39
- Language
- English
- Funding
Creators
Baggström, Adrian
Versions
Version 1:
https://doi.org/10.82595/scilifelab.et04e-2x897 current
https://doi.org/10.82595/scilifelab.et04e-2x897 current
