Monitor Land Use Changes with Google Earth Engine

Temporal Land Use Land Cover Analyses with Dynamic World

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

One day, I watched a YouTube video about a pool tech called Mark Jones. What amazed me the most was that he used Google Maps’ satellite mode to find new customers in his subdivision for free. That video set off my interest in remote sensing and geospatial analysis. And I have learned that people have used satellite images to do many exciting projects. For example, Frake et al. mapped the mosquitoes that transmit malaria in Malawi; Piralilou et al. predicted wildfire susceptibility using machine learning on remote sensing data. Coincidentally, both teams used Google Earth Engine.

Google Earth Engine (EE) is a planetary-scale software and data platform. It runs on Google’s cloud infrastructure and boasts a petabyte-scale database with 37 years’ worth of data. EE provides us with Python and JavaScript API. We can either use the Google Colab or, more conveniently, its intuitive and powerful online Code Editor (Figure 1). EE is available for commercial use and free for academic and research use.

Figure 1. Google Earth Engine Code Editor. Image by author.