austrata

Access Geoscience Australia borehole and hydrogeology data through their open OGC/ArcGIS web services, with a provenance-aware local cache.

austrata models boreholes as first-class objects (a header plus downhole stratigraphy and earth-material logs), lets you pull every bore inside an arbitrary polygon or bounding box, and exposes the Hydrogeology of Australia polygon layer to overlay. It talks to two backends behind one API: the GA boreholes GeoServer (WFS) and the Hydrogeology of Australia ArcGIS MapServer. Results are cached locally as GeoParquet with a provenance manifest, and revalidated before refetching so repeated queries are cheap and reproducible.

Everything is returned in lon/lat (EPSG:4283, GDA94 geographic). Map projection and mesh generation are deliberately out of scope — those live in the companion omega package, which consumes this one.

Installation

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Requires Python 3.11+. Runtime dependencies are geopandas, shapely, pyproj, pyogrio, pyarrow, requests, tenacity, platformdirs, and filelock.

Quickstart

from austrata import GADataClient
from shapely.geometry import box

ga = GADataClient()                      # cache defaults to the OS user cache dir

# Boreholes inside a bounding box (lon/lat). Paginated and cached automatically.
bores = ga.boreholes(bbox=(148.9, -35.6, 149.3, -35.1))
print(len(bores), "boreholes")
gdf = bores.to_geodataframe()            # headers as a GeoDataFrame (EPSG:4283)

# Or pass any shapely geometry as the region.
bores = ga.boreholes(region=box(148.9, -35.6, 149.3, -35.1))

# Load downhole logs for the whole collection in one shot (ENO-batched, cached).
bores.load_logs("stratigraphy")
for b in bores:
    for interval in b.stratigraphy:      # list of StratigraphyInterval
        if interval.valid:
            print(b.name, interval.top_depth, interval.bottom_depth, interval.unit)

bores.load_logs("earth_material")        # b.earth_material is then populated

# Export the loaded logs as a tidy GeoDataFrame (one row per interval, borehole
# point geometry, EPSG:4283). Save with geopandas: .to_file('x.gpkg') / .to_csv(...).
strat = bores.stratigraphy_geodataframe()
earth = bores.earth_material_geodataframe()

# A single borehole by ENO or PID.
one = ga.borehole("35147")

# Hydrogeology polygons to overlay, as a GeoDataFrame.
hydro = ga.hydrogeology(bbox=(148.9, -35.6, 149.3, -35.1))

# A backend filter passes straight through.
diamond = ga.boreholes(bbox=(148.9, -35.6, 149.3, -35.1), filter="drillingMethod='Diamond'")

Dry-run counts

Pass count_only=True to get the number of features without downloading them (uses the cheap resultType=hits / returnCountOnly paths):

n_bores = ga.boreholes(bbox=(148.9, -35.6, 149.3, -35.1), count_only=True)
n_units = ga.hydrogeology(bbox=(148.9, -35.6, 149.3, -35.1), count_only=True)

Caching, freshness, and offline use

Each logical query is cached as a <hash>.parquet file plus an entry in a manifest.json, in an OS-appropriate user cache directory (e.g. ~/Library/Caches/austrata on macOS). Override the location with the cache_dir= argument or the AUSTRATA_DATA_DIR environment variable.

On a repeat query austrata revalidates rather than blindly refetching: the ArcGIS path uses the service ETag (conditional If-None-Match), and the WFS path — which exposes no ETag — compares the numberMatched count as a cheap fingerprint. Both fall back to a max-age TTL (30 days by default), so a same-count content edit is eventually picked up. force_refresh=True is the only hard guarantee of a fresh pull.

ga = GADataClient(offline=True)          # never touch the network; serve cache or raise
ga = GADataClient(max_age=7 * 24 * 3600) # revalidate-by-refetch weekly
bores = ga.boreholes(bbox=..., force_refresh=True)

# Inspect or clear the cache.
ga.cache.info()                          # dir, entry count, total bytes, per-entry detail
ga.cache.list()                          # cached keys
ga.cache.clear()                         # wipe everything (or clear(key) for one)

To prefetch for offline/field use, run the queries you need once while online; they land in the cache and an offline=True client serves them thereafter.

Citing the data

Geoscience Australia publishes this data under CC BY 4.0. austrata records the provenance of every cached query so you can cite it with its access date:

print(bores.citation())                  # citation string incl. "Accessed YYYY-MM-DD"
bores.provenance()                        # dict: source_url, license, fetched_at, ...

from austrata import hydrogeology_citation
print(hydrogeology_citation(hydro))

The lon/lat (GDA94) contract

Both services are native EPSG:4283 (GDA94 geographic). austrata pins this end to end: the WFS bbox carries an explicit EPSG:4283 suffix, and ArcGIS queries force outSR=4283 (its GeoJSON otherwise silently defaults to WGS84). Every geometry you get back is lon/lat in GDA94 — no reprojection happens here.

Architecture

The package follows clean-architecture / DDD layering (see DESIGN.md):

• domain/ — pure value objects and entities (Region, Borehole, BoreholeCollection, StratigraphyInterval, EarthMaterialInterval, HydrogeologyUnit). No I/O.
• ports/ — the interfaces the application layer depends on (BoreholeSource, HydrogeologySource, DatasetCache).
• application/ — use cases that build per-backend cache fetch-plans.
• infrastructure/ — the HTTP client, the WFS and ArcGIS adapters, the feature mappers, and the dataset cache.
• client.py — the GADataClient facade that wires it together.

License

MIT (the code). The data accessed through it is © Geoscience Australia, CC BY 4.0.