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Google's Earth Engine

Use

  • Established in 2010 as a geospatial analysis platform (Kumar & Mutanga, 2018)
  • run in the cloud (allows analysis of large datasets)
  • public datasets promotes open science and reproducibility
  • cloud computing allows planetary scale analysis (Kumar & Mutanga, 2018)
  • users can upload their own datasets and write their own scripts to perform analyses (Kumar & Mutanga, 2018)
  • The development of GEE as a free resource creates equity within science
  • brings a high level analysis tool to a wider range of people, which furthers open science and promotes inquiry, discovery, and collaboration

    Earth Engine Example Image Figure credit: Image created by Diana Krupnik for article on teaching using the GEE API

APIs

  • Javascript
  • Python
  • Rest

Structure

  • initially featured a data repository from the past 40 years of global remote sensing data
  • now expanded to include vector, climate, demographic, and elevation data
  • These datasets can be layered to perform complex geospatial analyses
  • community datasets are open source

Code Editor

  • Web based IDE for writing scripts (Get Started with Earth Engine | Google Earth Engine |, n.d.)
  • complex geospatial work flows made easy
  • interactive environment for developing earth engine applications
  • raster data type is a matrix of cells in grid format -- digital aerial photographs, scanned maps