sprej

Sprej is an open‑source software platform developed by researchers at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Ljubljana. The project was initiated in 2018 to provide a modular environment for the analysis and visualization of large environmental datasets, particularly those generated by satellite remote sensing. Sprej was designed with a modular plugin architecture that allows scientists to integrate custom algorithms for data processing, time‑series analysis, and machine‑learning model training. The core of the platform is written in Python and makes extensive use of NumPy, SciPy, and Pandas for numerical work, while the visualization layer relies on Dask, Bokeh, and Leaflet for interactive maps.

The development team releases Sprej under a permissive MIT license, encouraging contributions from the wider research community. The platform includes a command‑line interface, a RESTful API, and a Jupyter notebook integration that facilitates reproducible research workflows. Key features of Sprej include automated data ingestion pipelines, cloud‑based scaling using AWS and Google Cloud, and built‑in support for geospatial data formats such as GeoTIFF, NetCDF, and HDF5.

Since its first release, Sprej has been adopted by several research groups working on climate change mitigation, urban heat island studies, and biodiversity monitoring. Peer‑reviewed papers that cite Sprej demonstrate its use in the analysis of multi‑temporal satellite imagery, the development of regional climate models, and the assessment of environmental policy impacts. The project hosts a public GitHub repository, where its issues and pull requests are visible to the community, and it maintains a pull‑request review policy that emphasizes code quality, documentation, and unit testing.

Future plans for Sprej include the integration of real‑time data streaming from Internet of Things (IoT) sensor networks, the expansion of its machine‑learning toolbox to support TensorFlow and PyTorch models, and the implementation of a web‑based dashboard for non‑technical stakeholders. The development roadmap, community guidelines, and contribution tutorials are all detailed in the project's official documentation site.