Geospatial Data

Geospatial data is any data that includes a geographic component — coordinates, boundaries, or spatial relationships — allowing it to be placed on a map and analyzed in relation to physical locations. In agricultural software, nearly everything is geospatial: fields are polygons, yield measurements are points, prescriptions are zones, and equipment tracks are linestrings.

Common Geospatial Formats in Agriculture

When working with FieldMCP's APIs, you'll encounter these formats:

• GeoJSON — The default format for web APIs. FieldMCP returns field boundaries, scouting observations, and prescription zones as GeoJSON features with properties. Human-readable and natively supported by every mapping library.
• Shapefile — Legacy format still dominant in desktop GIS and equipment controllers. A single "shapefile" is actually 3-6 files (.shp, .dbf, .shx, .prj, etc.).
• ISO-XML — ISOBUS standard format for task data exchange between farm software and equipment controllers. Used for prescriptions and as-applied records.
• GeoTIFF — Raster format for imagery layers like NDVI. Each pixel has a value and a geographic coordinate.

Coordinate Reference Systems

Agricultural geospatial data almost universally uses WGS 84 (EPSG:4326) — the same coordinate system as GPS. FieldMCP normalizes all provider data to WGS 84 longitude/latitude pairs. If you need to calculate areas or distances accurately, project to a local UTM zone first.

Working with Geospatial Data

For developers building on FieldMCP:

• Rendering — Use Mapbox GL, Leaflet, or Deck.gl to visualize GeoJSON on interactive maps
• Analysis — Turf.js handles client-side spatial operations (area calculation, point-in-polygon, buffering)
• Storage — PostGIS extends PostgreSQL with spatial types and indexes if you need server-side queries

Getting Started

FieldMCP's MCP tools return geospatial data as GeoJSON by default. See the tools reference and the data normalization glossary entry for how cross-provider data is standardized.