Context

The EDITO STAC Browser is a graphical tool to explore everything referenced in the EDITO Data Catalogue, without writing a single API request. STAC (SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog) is the standard EDITO uses to describe and organize its datasets.

The Browser gives you a visual way to interact with that structure: you can browse the catalogue hierarchy, search across it by keyword, date, or location, preview a dataset's coverage on a map, and download the data itself, whether you're just exploring what's available or looking for a specific product.

📌 Note: the STAC Browser is a viewer. To create or edit catalogues, collections, or items yourself, you'll need the Data API instead.

Overview of the interface

The STAC Browser has four tabs, at the top left of the page:

Browse: navigate the catalogue hierarchy visually, starting from the top-level list of catalogues (Copernicus Marine Products, EMODnet, Project catalog, Users catalog, Variable families) and drilling down into collections and items.

Search: search across the whole catalogue at once (by keyword, date, bounding box, etc.) instead of navigating level by level.

Favorites: to have a quick access to your favorites items, collections or catalogs.

API: hows the root URL of the underlying STAC API, plus the list of supported standards (Conformance Classes, OGC and STAC). The URL field itself isn't clickable, use the copy or open-in-new-tab icons right next to it to grab or follow the link.

📌 Note: the open icon takes you to the raw JSON of the API root document. It does contain clickable links to sub-resources (OpenAPI docs, conformance, collections, etc.), but the raw JSON view is fairly technical, better suited to people who already know what they're looking for than for casual browsing.

💡EDITO Pro Tip: on any listing page (catalogues, collections, or items), you can switch between a Tiles view and a List view, sort results Ascending or Descending, and filter by title, description, or keywords using the search box at the top of the list.

Homepage

When you open the Browse tab and click on the first folder EDITO Data Catalog you land directly on a page listing what the interface labels "Catalogs", currently 449 of them.

Despite the label, this isn't the exact STAC term for what you're seeing: these entries are actually collections (the objective classification by scientific variable, e.g. "Age of sea ice", "Air density"), not STAC Catalogs. The interface's "Catalogs" counter here just means "browsable entries", not the strict STAC type.

💡 EDITO Pro Tip: you can filter this list by title, description, or keyword using the search box, and switch between Tiles and List view, sorted Ascending or Descending.

📌 Note: the "Children" link under Additional Resources points to the raw API metadata children list, it isn't useful for normal browsing, you can ignore it.

If you're looking for the actual STAC Catalogs (the subjective groupings: Copernicus Marine Products, EMODnet, Project catalog, Users catalog, Variable families), they're not shown separately on the homepage.

To find them, either:

Type "catalogs" in the filter box
Scroll through the 449 entries until you spot the one literally titled "Catalogs"

Clicking into it takes you to the list of the 5 catalogues.

Browsing by theme

Some catalogues are further organized into thematic sub-catalogues. For example, opening Variable families shows 29 themed groupings (Biomass, Chlorophyll, CO2, Current, Fisheries, etc.), each one gathering the collections related to that theme.

This gives you a second, thematic way to reach the same collections you'd otherwise find directly on the homepage.

Viewing a collection

Opening one of the 449 entries takes you to a collection page, showing:

Its description, license, and temporal extent
An interactive map showing its spatial coverage
Its item(s), each shown as a card with badges for the available formats (for example HTML, Parquet, ZIP), letting you get to the corresponding data

📌 Note: not every format badge shown on an item card is necessarily downloadable, some just indicate a format exists without being clickable. Check what a given badge does for the specific item you're looking at.

Provider information

A Metadata section further down gives detailed provenance and technical information about the collection:

Visibility, Data Version, Aliases: administrative info, whether the collection is public, its version number, and any alternate names it's known by
Identifiers (@context, @type, Name, Identifier): the collection's formal identity within the STAC/schema.org structure
Links (IsBasedOn, Url): references to the source dataset or system the collection is derived from
SpatialCoverage, TemporalCoverage: the geographic area and time range the collection covers
IsPartOf: the parent catalogue(s) this collection belongs to
Time of Data: when the underlying data was produced or last updated

Viewing an item

Clicking on an item takes you to its own page, showing:

An interactive map with its spatial extent, and shortcuts back to its parent Collection, one level Up, Source, and Share
A Collection card, linking back to the parent collection (with its description and temporal extent)
A Metadata section with the item's details:
- General subsection: ProductIdentifier, Visibility, Time of Data begins/ends, Provider (name and role for each contributor), Data Rights And Restrictions, Updated/Created dates, Likes, Comments, Owner, Status, and Centroid coordinates
- Additional sections, when present, group other properties specific to that item's dataset (for example variable-specific or provider-specific fields), organized the same way as General
An Asset section listing everything attached to the item (for example XML, CSW, a Web Map Service, or NetCDF data), each tagged with its type. Click one to expand it and reveal Download and Copy URL buttons.
An Additional Resources section, when available, for extra links such as a code example to open the dataset

📌 Note: clicking Source opens a panel with the item's raw STAC metadata: its ID, STAC Version, whether it's Valid against the STAC spec, and a field showing where the metadata file itself is located (again via copy/open icons, not a clickable text field).

💡 EDITO Pro Tip: if an item has a code snippet under Additional Resources (for example a Python example), it's usually the fastest way to start working with that dataset without digging through the assets yourself.

Filtering items within a collection

Before opening an item, you can narrow down a collection's item list using Show Filters:

Temporal Extent (1): restrict to a specific date range
Spatial Extent (2): restrict to a specific area, filtering by location instead of date
Additional filters (3): add filters on other properties via the Add filter dropdown, combined with either Match all filters (and) or Match any filters (or), and optionally inverted with Negate filter
Sort (4): change the ordering of results (not all sort options are supported for every collection)
Items per page (5): control how many results are shown at once, with First/Previous/Next to page through them

⚠️ Don't forget to submit to have your filters applied.

The same filters (plus Collections and Item IDs) are available globally from the Search tab, letting you filter across every collection at once instead of one at a time.

📌 Note: a collection can show 0 items if your current filters are too restrictive, for example a Temporal Extent that falls outside the data's actual coverage. Clear or widen the filter if you expect results but see none.

What's next?

If you have any questions, problems, or suggestions, please feel free to contact us via chat using the widget available at the bottom right of the page.

EDITO STAC Browser