Earth Engine Apps are here to stay
By Emily Schechter, Product Manager, Google Earth Engine
We launched Earth Engine Apps in 2018 to help you scale the impact of your analysis by sharing it with a wider audience. Since then, more than 50,000 Earth Engine apps have been created to share Earth Engine analyses. Today, we’re adding a logo-upload feature and removing the “experimental” header, welcoming Earth Engine apps as a full member of our product family.
As we welcome Apps into our product family, we’d like to share a few example Apps made by the Earth Engine community that demonstrate decision-making and educational impact made possible by Earth Engine Apps.
More than two years in development, the Global Safety Net (App) is the first comprehensive global-scale analysis and spatially explicit blueprint of terrestrial areas essential for biodiversity and climate resilience, totaling 50.4% of the Earth’s land. The report was published in Science Advances and highlights the importance of protecting and restoring the natural world to address three converging crises — climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and the emergence of novel viruses such as COVID-19.
Forests worldwide are in a state of flux, with accelerating losses in some regions and gains in others. Hansen et al 2013. examined global Landsat data at a 30-meter spatial resolution to characterize forest extent, loss, and gain from 2000 to 2020. The Global Forest Change App allows users to explore the Hansen et al. (2013) Global Forest Change dataset.
Liza Goldberg, a student at Stanford University and a biospheric scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, runs Cloud to Classroom. Cloud to Classroom is a program that uses a series of Earth Engine Apps to help teach students around the world about climate change.
The new Apps header doesn’t include “experimental,” and can include a header image uploading during the “Create App” step. We hope this gives you more options to customize the appearance your Apps.
To see examples of the kinds of interfaces you can build with Apps, check out our curated Apps page. When you’re ready to get started building your App, head over to the Apps documentation.
