A precursor software component, DecisionTree, was developed beginning in 2006 with support from a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In 2009, with financial support from the William Penn Foundation and Stroud Water Research Center, Azavea embarked on early development of GeoTrellis.

GeoTrellis was released as an open source project in 2011 [2] with the goal of supporting fast processing of geospatial raster data at scale.

One key use case that drove this phase of development was the need to efficiently process large, spatiotemporal datasets like those used for many earth science applications, such as climate change.

[6] GeoTrellis has been used in a number of geospatial domains including: satellite and aerial image processing, forest growth simulation, agricultural yield predictions, planning, digital humanities, government infrastructure investment, and machine learning to support crime risk forecasting.