API reference

Terms are defined in the glossary — spatial unit, prototype distance, height cascade, urban canopy parameter and the rest.

How to read this

lczkit's top-level __init__ carries only __version__. There is no curated re-export layer, so every symbol is reached by its module path — from lczkit.pipeline import run_pipeline, from lczkit.classify import PrototypeClassifier. This reference is organised the same way: by module, under the stage of the pipeline it belongs to.

Two pages are the anchors:

• Protocols — the five typing.Protocol definitions that are the package's seams. Every implementation is structural, so a class implementing one of these does not subclass it; the contract is stated once, here.
• Configuration — the single pydantic model, serialised verbatim into every run manifest alongside the pinned Overture release, the resolved package versions and a timestamp. Reproducibility is a feature of this package rather than an afterthought.

The unit of exchange

Every stage after unit generation is a join on unit_id. The thing passed between stages is a GeoDataFrame indexed by a stable string unit_id — parameters, land-cover fractions, classification, provenance and validation all key on it. There is deliberately no second exchange format.

All internal computation happens in a projected coordinate reference system — one whose coordinates are metres, so that areas and distances mean what they say — obtained via gdf.estimate_utm_crs(). Longitude and latitude appear only when data is read and written, and the rule is enforced by lczkit.crs.assert_projected_crs rather than left to convention.

The pipeline, in order

Stage	Page	What it does
Ingestion	Sources	fetches the buildings, streets, water and land use from Overture, and the height and land-cover rasters
Cleaning	Cleaning	repairs and simplifies them, producing two building layers — one valid for topology, one that preserves area
Units	Spatial units	cuts the study area into the polygons everything is measured on, keyed by unit_id
Heights	Height cascade	gives every building a height, and records which source it came from
Land cover	Land cover	measures what share of each unit is paved, vegetated, tree or water
Parameters	Urban canopy parameters	measures the shape of the surface in each unit — the inputs to the classification
Classification	Classification	scores each unit against all seventeen classes and reports the full distance vector
Validation	Validation	compares the result to a reference label set, where one exists
Output	Output	writes the tables, the manifest and the reports
Map site	Map site	builds a self-contained web map from what was written

Pipeline is the chain itself, plus the presets and city registry the command line resolves against. Command line is the thin layer over it.

Package

lczkit

lczkit — map cities into Local Climate Zones from open vector and raster data.