WhiteboxTools
Open SourceVerified
500+ fast geospatial analysis tools with the best DEM hydrology toolkit in open source.
RichDEM
DormantHigh-performance DEM conditioning — Priority-Flood depression filling at scale, C++ with Python bindings.
- Pricing
- Open Source
- License
- GPL-3.0
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- C++, Python
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
Install
pip install richdemAbout RichDEM
RichDEM, by Richard Barnes, packages his influential terrain-analysis algorithms — Priority-Flood depression filling, depression breaching, flow accumulation across eight flow metrics (D8, D-infinity, Freeman, Quinn and more) — as a C++ library with clean Python bindings. The algorithms are the ones his widely-cited papers describe, and the implementations are built for very large DEMs, with parallel variants that have processed continent-scale terrain.
Development has slowed in recent years, but the library remains sound and widely used; every routine cites the paper it implements, which makes methods sections easy. For interactive workflows WhiteboxTools offers more breadth; RichDEM wins when raw conditioning speed inside a Python pipeline is the requirement.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
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Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with RichDEM.
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