Earth monitoring for everyone: announcing Earth Index alpha

Earth Genome is a nonprofit on a mission to drive positive change for people and the planet through effective use of environmental data. Today represents a major step forward on that mission: our AI-powered platform for planetary environmental monitoring, Earth Index, has officially graduated to Alpha status and will soon be freely available to priority partners.

Earth Index uses large geospatial AI foundation models to simplify and accelerate environmental monitoring, so anyone, regardless of technical background, can create actionable data from satellite imagery. In the animation below, a user who wants to understand where solar energy construction is happening in the southern Mekong basin uses Earth Index to quickly build a map of solar panels.

Earth Index is a new way of working with satellite imagery. Without knowing anything about modern machine learning models (architectures, ML libraries), satellite imagery processing (cloud-free mosaic creation, multispectral analysis), digital mapping (projections, tiles), or a host of other tricky components of technical geospatial work, a user with a real need can quickly obtain actionable data, while all those elements are automated behind the scenes.

Earth Index is an AI-powered tool that advances a set of key principles:

• It shouldn’t require an advanced technical degree or years of training to understand the state of nature in your own community.
• Environmental challenges are global problems with local solutions. Models and data therefore need to be fine-tuned to the local context.
• Data is most effective when it is created by the community that will use it.
• Data about local communities should be owned by local communities.

This is the promise of Earth Index: now, anyone can search, monitor, and drive positive impact for their local environment and community.

Where Earth Index is already making a difference

Despite its recent development, Earth Index has already resulted in abundant real-world applications and impact.

• Earth Index exposed illegal gold mining in the Yanomami region of the Brazilian Amazon. As reported by Repórter Brasil, “The destruction caused by illegal gold mining in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory (TIY)…is three times more than what was previously announced by other regulatory agencies…directly impacting one out of every three Yanomami villages.”
• We’re tracking cattle factory farms across the planet using Earth Index with Climate TRACE. This continues work mapping billions of chickens that are raised in American factory farms, impacting both the environment and public health.
• Journalists in Southeast Asia are using Earth Index to plan fact finding field trips, exposing how indigenous communities are threatened by insatiable commodity markets. Stay tuned for more details in publications this summer.

All of that work was done using an early limited prototype version of Earth Index. Today, with the arrival of the brand new alpha version, we’re excited to see the number of users and use cases multiply. Soon, Earth Index will be powering projects with the World Bank, searching for illicit gold mining in Africa and dams along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It will supercharge the work of partners like Conservation Metrics International and Instituto Socioambiental who assist indigenous communities with protecting native lands.

With a completely updated UI and set of supporting services, it’s time to share Earth Index and discover the potential of user-centered environmental monitoring.

Who we are designing for

We’ve identified a set of core users that we believe will find tremendous value in Earth Index:

• Indigenous peoples and local communities: track infrastructure development, deforestation, and other changes impacting native lands.
• Geospatial and data analysts: accelerate the time to usable data. Instead of messing with hyperparameters and data cleaning, focus on what matters: understanding and analysis.
• Data journalists: scope reporting field trips and understand regional changes in the environment.

If you fit one of those categories (or even if you don’t!) and you think you’d benefit from Earth Index, please reach out. We’d love to hear from you.

What’s new in Earth Index Alpha

The short answer to “what’s new in the alpha” is simple. Everything. From the ground up, we’ve re-engineered the platform, drawing from the many lessons we’ve learned from early prototype deployment. Highlights include:

1. A modern, user-centered UI: We’ve spent months interviewing users and identifying an initial set of features, all designed to get users answers — fast. We then built these features using modern front end web frameworks and libraries (Next.js, Mapbox GL JS, and others).
2. Scalable and performant API and backend services: To power the UI, we’ve rebuilt the backend of Earth Index in Go and have invented new techniques for generating and serving geospatial foundation models and their embeddings at scale.

All of this comes together in a user experience that is both delightful and insightful. Click on the map, and instantly find a usable dataset of your search target. Save that work, and then revisit and refine it later. Share the outputs of your monitoring work and incorporate the geospatial data into downstream workflows.

Sign up to learn more

Do you have an idea for how Earth Index could be used to drive positive change for people and the planet? If so, we’d love to hear from you. Join the waitlist here and we’ll be in touch soon.