Integrating GRASS GIS and Jupyter Notebooks to facilitate advanced geospatial modeling education

Abstract

AbstractOpen education materials are critical for the advancement of open science and the development of open‐source software. These accessible and transparent materials provide an important pathway for sharing both standard geospatial analysis workflows and advanced research methods. Computational notebooks allow users to share live code with in‐line visualizations and narrative text, making them a powerful interactive teaching tool for geospatial analytics. Specifically, Jupyter Notebooks are quickly becoming a standard format in open education. In this article, we introduce a new GRASS GIS package, grass.jupyter, that enhances the existing GRASS Python API to allow Jupyter Notebook users to easily manage and visualize GRASS data including spatiotemporal datasets. While there are many Python‐based geospatial libraries available for use in Jupyter Notebooks, GRASS GIS has extensive geospatial functionality including support for multi‐temporal analysis and dynamic simulations, making it a powerful teaching tool for advanced geospatial analytics. We discuss the development of grass.jupyter and demonstrate how the package facilitates teaching open‐source geospatial modeling with a collection of Jupyter Notebooks designed for a graduate‐level geospatial modeling course. The open education notebooks feature spatiotemporal data visualizations, hydrologic modeling, and spread simulations such as the spread of invasive species and urban growth.