New textbook teaches hands-on applications for Earth Engine
By Nicholas Clinton, Developer Advocate, Google Earth Outreach
A bunch of years ago, I teamed up with professor David Saah to teach a remote sensing class at the University of San Francisco. We wanted to use Google Earth Engine to teach the class, but lacked teaching resources. So we set about creating some Earth Engine “labs” for the students, which we later hosted on the Earth Engine EDU page. A couple years later, I was discussing all this over a couple pints with professor Jeff Cardille (McGill University) in a pub in Dublin, Ireland. When I mentioned that what we really needed was a book, an Earth Engine textbook, he got interested. A couple years after that, Jeff, Dave and I joined forces with Morgan Crowley (then McGill University, now Natural Resources Canada) to make the idea a reality: the world’s first Earth Engine textbook!
There’s something more to Earth Engine than just software: It’s community. Nonprofit groups, scientists, governments, companies, and Indigenous peoples use Earth Engine to apply cloud-based remote sensing to their projects all over the world. They share their findings with each other with the goal of learning more about making our planet better. We all love Earth Engine so much, we wanted the new textbook, Cloud-Based Remote Sensing with Google Earth Engine: Fundamentals and Applications (EEFA) to make it easier than ever to share the joy and join the community.
The free textbook, which is available in draft form online, was created by and for the users of Earth Engine — in particular, the remote sensing and GIS academic community. Across 55 chapters and thousands of lines of code, the book will help professors who teach Earth Engine to choose lessons and get students using the platform right away. It will be formally published and citable in 2023 on the SpringerOpen imprint.
Remote sensing and GIS educators want to teach, but they also want to spend time on research that highlights environmental change. In every chapter of EEFA, the writers include theory, code examples, questions, and assignments so students can put their Earth Engine knowledge into practice. When I was a professor, my students always asked for examples of practical application of theory. In the EEFA book, they have plenty of real-life examples of Earth Engine-based projects to choose from: human, aquatic and hydrological, and terrestrial applications.
To help students at every level, the book is split into two sections:
- Fundamentals: A set of 31 labs designed to take readers from Earth Engine novices to advanced users.
- Applications: A tour of the world of Earth Engine across 24 chapters, showing how it’s used in a wide variety of settings that rely on remote-sensing data.
In classes where students may already know the basics of Earth Engine, the Applications chapters can keep them engaged with the many ways our community is exploring land and water to shed light on the planet’s most pressing challenges.
A book that captures the Earth Engine community’s breadth and depth
By providing a cloud-based platform with almost instant access to petabytes of data, Earth Engine shifted the paradigm of remote sensing. When we set about teaching this new paradigm, we quickly realized that there was no suitable reference. Existing remote sensing textbooks, while strong on theory, were not built to describe the fast-changing world of cloud-based remote sensing. So we knew there was going to be a lot of demand for a new reference, especially as Earth Engine gained popularity.
We also saw the need for a book that reflected the rich and diverse world of today’s remote sensing researchers and communities. The diversity cuts across every category. There are contributions from undergraduates, master’s students, PhD students, postdocs, assistant professors, associate professors, and independent consultants. The applications rely on research, and researchers, from all over the world. We’re hopeful that this representation means that students from all around the world will find something in the book that relates to their home environment.
The book team also took great care to ensure quality of the content. On at least three occasions, people working independently of each other have reviewed the text of every chapter for the clarity of the scientific content and instructions. More than 30 volunteers produced more than 350 detailed chapter reviews as part of the book’s creation and error checking. In addition, Earth Engine experts have reviewed the code in each chapter multiple times, first for best practices, but also for consistency with the book’s text. Anyone can access the code right from the Earth Engine Code Editor (link), so it’s easy for anyone to learn from and build off the book code repository.
Community engagement
While we’ve done a lot of work to present learners with quality, up-to-date content, the book is not meant to be static. It’s meant to evolve and change as researchers update their studies and readers suggest new approaches. We encourage reviews and bug reports from readers, who can access a link at the end of every chapter. We also have plans to host the book’s code on GitHub.
We want the book to be accessible to anyone. To appeal to readers for whom English is not a first language, we welcome volunteers for translation efforts (express interest here). The first languages for the 40+ volunteers will likely be Mandarin, Spanish, and French. We also recently began an outreach effort through which book authors present their chapter(s) on video (more information on the book website). The videos are hosted on this YouTube channel to allow everyone around the world to follow the authors’ instructions, captioned in the viewer’s own preferred language!
Keep your eye on the book website for more information. In the meantime, happy coding!
