GEOtiled-SG: A Scalable Framework for High-Resolution Terrain Parameter Computation

Abstract

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GEOtiled enables efficient computation of high-resolution terrain parameters from digital elevation models (DEMs) by decomposing large regions into smaller, parallelizable tiles. Originally developed as GEOtiled-G with support for three parameters (Slope, Aspect, Hillshade) via GDAL, we present GEOtiled-SG, an enhanced version that integrates the SAGA GIS library to compute over 15 parameters, expanding its utility in Earth science. To offset SAGA’s computational overhead, GEOtiled-SG introduces three optimizations: concurrent DEM cropping, buffer-aware mosaicking, and unified concurrency across workflow stages. Evaluations show that GEOtiled-SG maintains GEOtiled-G’s performance on the original parameters and offers consistent speedups across the expanded set. The framework is open source on GitHub, with data hosted on Dataverse, supporting reproducible, scalable terrain analysis.