Rasterio is a GDAL and NumPy-based Python library for raster data, written with the Python developer in mind instead of C, using Python language types, protocols, and idioms. Rasterio aims to make GIS data more accessible to Python programmers and helps GIS analysts learn important Python standards. Rasterio relies on concepts of Python rather than GIS.

Rasterio is an open source project from the satellite team of Mapbox, a provider of custom online maps for websites and applications. The name of this library should be pronounced as raster-i-o rather than ras-te-rio. Rasterio came into being as a result of a project called the Mapbox Cloudless Atlas, which aimed to create a pretty-looking basemap from satellite imagery.

One of the software requirements was to use open source software and a high-level language with handy multi-dimensional array syntax. Although GDAL offers proven algorithms and drivers, developing with GDAL's Python bindings feels a lot like C++.

Therefore, Rasterio was designed to be a Python package at the top, with extension modules (using Cython) in the middle, and a GDAL shared library on the bottom. Other requirements for the raster library were being able to read and write NumPy ndarrays to and from data files, use Python types, protocols, and idioms instead of C or C++ to free programmers from having to code in two languages.

For georeferencing, Rasterio follows the lead of pyproj. There are a couple of capabilities added on top of reading and writing, one of them being a features module. Reprojection of geospatial data can be done with the rasterio.warp module.

Rasterio's project homepage can be found here: https://github.com/mapbox/rasterio