Meet Earth EngineGoogle Earth Engine combines a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis capabilities and makes it available for scientists, researchers, and developers to detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth's surface.SATELLITE IMAGERY+YOUR ALGORITHMS+REAL WORLD APPLICATIONSLEARN MOREGLOBAL-SCALE INSIGHTExplore our interactive timelapse viewer to travel back in time and see how the world has changed over the past twenty-nine years. Timelapse is one example of how Earth Engine can help gain insight into petabyte-scale datasets.EXPLORE TIMELAPSEREADY-TO-USE DATASETSThe public data archive includes more than thirty years of historical imagery and scientific datasets, updated and expanded daily. It contains over twenty petabytes of geospatial data instantly available for analysis.EXPLORE DATASETSSIMPLE, YET POWERFUL APIThe Earth Engine API is available in Python and JavaScript, making it easy to harness the power of Google’s cloud for your own geospatial analysis.EXPLORE THE APIGoogle Earth Engine has made it possible for the first time in history to rapidly and accurately process vast amounts of satellite imagery, identifying where and when tree cover change has occurred at high resolution. Global Forest Watch would not exist without it. For those who care about the future of the planet Google Earth Engine is a great blessing!-Dr. Andrew Steer, President and CEO of the World Resources Institute.CONVENIENT TOOLSUse our web-based code editor for fast, interactive algorithm development with instant access to petabytes of data.LEARN ABOUT THE CODE EDITORSCIENTIFIC AND HUMANITARIAN IMPACTScientists and non-profits use Earth Engine for remote sensing research, predicting disease outbreaks, natural resource management, and more.SEE CASE STUDIESREADY TO BE PART OF THE SOLUTION?SIGN UP NOWTERMS OF SERVICE PRIVACY ABOUT GOOGLE

The Gridded Surface Meteorological dataset provides high spatial resolution (~4-km) daily surface fields of temperature, precipitation, winds, humidity and radiation across the contiguous United States from 1979. The dataset blends the high resolution spatial data from PRISM with the high temporal resolution data from the National Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) to produce spatially and temporally continuous fields that lend themselves to additional land surface modeling. This dataset contains provisional products that are replaced with updated versions when the complete source data become available. Products can be distinguished by the value of the 'status' property. At first, assets are ingested with status='early'. After several days, they are replaced by assets with status='provisional'. After about 2 months, they are replaced by the final assets with status='permanent'.

This archive contains native resolution and super resolution (SR) Landsat imagery, derivative lake shorelines, and previously-published lake shorelines derived airborne remote sensing, used here for comparison. Landsat images are from 1985 (Landsat 5) and 2017 (Landsat 8) and are cropped to study areas used in the corresponding paper and converted to 8-bit format. SR images were created using the model of Lezine et al (2021a, 2021b), which outputs imagery at 10x-finer resolution, and they have the same extent and bit depth as the native resolution scenes included. Reference shoreline datasets are from Kyzivat et al. (2019a and 2019b) for the year 2017 and Walter Anthony et al. (2021a, 2021b) for Fairbanks, AK, USA in 1985. All derived and comparison shoreline datasets are cropped to the same extent, filtered to a common minimum lake size (40 m2 for 2017; 13 m2 for 1985), and smoothed via 10 m morphological closing. The SR-derived lakes were determined to have F-1 scores of 0.75 (2017 data) and 0.60 (1985 data) as compared to reference lakes for lakes larger than 500 m2, and accuracy is worse for smaller lakes. More details are in the forthcoming accompanying publication.

All raster images are in cloud-optimized geotiff (COG) format (.tif) with file naming shown in Table 1. Vector shoreline datasets are in ESRI shapefile format (.shp, .dbf, etc.), and file names use the abbreviations LR for low resolution, SR for high resolution, and GT for “ground truth” comparison airborne-derived datasets.

Landsat-5 and Landsat-8 images courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey

For an interactive map demo of these datasets via Google Earth Engine Apps, visit: https://ekyzivat.users.earthengine.app/view/super-resolution-demo

Table 1: File naming scheme based on region, with some regions requiring two-scene mosaics.

Region

Landsat ID

Mosaic name

Yukon Flats Basin

LC08_L2SP_068014_20170708_20200903_02_T1

LC08_20170708_yflats_cog.tif

“

LC08_L2SP_068013_20170708_20201015_02_T1

“

Old Crow Flats

LC08_L2SP_067012_20170903_20200903_02_T1

-

Mackenzie River Delta

LC08_L2SP_064011_20170728_20200903_02_T1

LC08_20170728_inuvik_cog.tif

“

LC08_L2SP_064012_20170728_20200903_02_T1

“

Canadian Shield Margin

LC08_L2SP_050015_20170811_20200903_02_T1

LC08_20170811_cshield-margin_cog.tif

“

LC08_L2SP_048016_20170829_20200903_02_T1

“

Canadian Shield near Baker Creek

LC08_L2SP_046016_20170831_20200903_02_T1

-

Canadian Shield near Daring Lake

LC08_L2SP_045015_20170723_20201015_02_T1

-

Peace-Athabasca Delta

LC08_L2SP_043019_20170810_20200903_02_T1

-

Prairie Potholes North 1

LC08_L2SP_041021_20170812_20200903_02_T1

LC08_20170812_potholes-north1_cog.tif

“

LC08_L2SP_041022_20170812_20200903_02_T1

“

Prairie Potholes North 2

LC08_L2SP_038023_20170823_20200903_02_T1

-

Prairie Potholes South

LC08_L2SP_031027_20170907_20200903_02_T1

-

Fairbanks

LT05_L2SP_070014_19850831_20200918_02_T1

-

References:

Kyzivat, E. D., Smith, L. C., Pitcher, L. H., Fayne, J. V., Cooley, S. W., Cooper, M. G., Topp, S. N., Langhorst, T., Harlan, M. E., Horvat, C., Gleason, C. J., & Pavelsky, T. M. (2019b). A high-resolution airborne color-infrared camera water mask for the NASA ABoVE campaign. Remote Sensing, 11(18), 2163. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11182163

Kyzivat, E.D., L.C. Smith, L.H. Pitcher, J.V. Fayne, S.W. Cooley, M.G. Cooper, S. Topp, T. Langhorst, M.E. Harlan, C.J. Gleason, and T.M. Pavelsky. 2019a. ABoVE: AirSWOT Water Masks from Color-Infrared Imagery over Alaska and Canada, 2017. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1707

Ekaterina M. D. Lezine, Kyzivat, E. D., & Smith, L. C. (2021a). Super-resolution surface water mapping on the Canadian shield using planet CubeSat images and a generative adversarial network. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, 47(2), 261–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/07038992.2021.1924646

Ekaterina M. D. Lezine, Kyzivat, E. D., & Smith, L. C. (2021b). Super-resolution surface water mapping on the canadian shield using planet CubeSat images and a generative adversarial network. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, 47(2), 261–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/07038992.2021.1924646

Walter Anthony, K.., Lindgren, P., Hanke, P., Engram, M., Anthony, P., Daanen, R. P., Bondurant, A., Liljedahl, A. K., Lenz, J., Grosse, G., Jones, B. M., Brosius, L., James, S. R., Minsley, B. J., Pastick, N. J., Munk, J., Chanton, J. P., Miller, C. E., & Meyer, F. J. (2021a). Decadal-scale hotspot methane ebullition within lakes following abrupt permafrost thaw. Environ. Res. Lett, 16, 35010. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abc848

Walter Anthony, K., and P. Lindgren. 2021b. ABoVE: Historical Lake Shorelines and Areas near Fairbanks, Alaska, 1949-2009. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1859

After 2022-01-25, Sentinel-2 scenes with PROCESSING_BASELINE '04.00' or above have their DN (value) range shifted by 1000. The HARMONIZED collection shifts data in newer scenes to be in the same range as in older scenes. Sentinel-2 is a wide-swath, high-resolution, multi-spectral imaging mission supporting Copernicus Land Monitoring studies, including the monitoring of vegetation, soil and water cover, as well as observation of inland waterways and coastal areas. The Sentinel-2 data contain 13 UINT16 spectral bands representing TOA reflectance scaled by 10000. See the Sentinel-2 User Handbook for details. QA60 is a bitmask band that contained rasterized cloud mask polygons until Feb 2022, when these polygons stopped being produced. Starting in February 2024, legacy-consistent QA60 bands are constructed from the MSK_CLASSI cloud classification bands. For more details, see the full explanation of how cloud masks are computed.. Each Sentinel-2 product (zip archive) may contain multiple granules. Each granule becomes a separate Earth Engine asset. EE asset ids for Sentinel-2 assets have the following format: COPERNICUS/S2/20151128T002653_20151128T102149_T56MNN. Here the first numeric part represents the sensing date and time, the second numeric part represents the product generation date and time, and the final 6-character string is a unique granule identifier indicating its UTM grid reference (see MGRS). The Level-2 data produced by ESA can be found in the collection COPERNICUS/S2_SR. For datasets to assist with cloud and/or cloud shadow detection, see COPERNICUS/S2_CLOUD_PROBABILITY and GOOGLE/CLOUD_SCORE_PLUS/V1/S2_HARMONIZED. For more details on Sentinel-2 radiometric resolution, see this page.

Google Earth Engine implementation of the Mapping Evapotranspiration at high Resolution with Internalized Calibration model (eeMETRIC) eeMETRIC applies the advanced METRIC algorithms and process of Allen et al. (2007; 2015) and Allen et al. (2013b), where a singular relationship between the near surface air temperature difference (dT) and delapsed land surface temperature (TsDEM) is used to estimate sensible heat flux (H) and is applied to each Landsat scene. Automated selection of the hot and cold pixels for an image generally follows a statistical isolation procedure described by Allen et al. (2013a) and ReVelle, Kilic and Allen (2019a,b). The calibration of H in eeMETRIC utilizes alfalfa reference ET calculated from the NLDAS gridded weather dataset using a fixed 15% reduction in computed reference ET to account for known biases in the gridded data set. The fixed reduction does not impact the calibration accuracy of eeMETRIC and mostly reduces impacts of boundary layer buoyancy correction. The identification of candidates for pools of hot and cold pixels has evolved in the eeMETRIC implementation of METRIC. The new automated calibration process incorporates the combination of methodologies and approaches that stem from two development branches of EEFlux (Allen et al., 2015). The first branch focused on improving the automated pixel selection process using standard lapse rates for land surface temperature (LST) without any further spatial delapsing (ReVelle et al., 2019b). The second branch incorporated a secondary spatial delapsing of LST as well as changes to the pixel selection process (ReVelle et al., 2019a). The final, combined approach is described by Kilic et al. (2021). eeMETRIC employs the aerodynamic-related functions in complex terrain (mountains) developed by Allen et al. (2013b) to improve estimates for aerodynamic roughness, wind speed and boundary layer stability as related to estimated terrain roughness, position on a slope and wind direction. These functions tend to increase estimates for H (and reduce ET) on windward slopes and may reduce H (and increase ET) on leeward slopes. Other METRIC functions employed in eeMETRIC that have been added since the descriptions provided in Allen et al. (2007 and 2011) include reduction in soil heat flux (G) in the presence of organic mulch on the ground surface, use of an excess aerodynamic resistance for shrublands, use of the Perrier function for trees identified as forest (Allen et al., 2018; Santos et al., 2012) and aerodynamic estimation of evaporation from open water rather than using energy balance (Jensen and Allen 2016; Allen et al., 2018). In 2022, the Perrier function was applied to tree (orchard) crops and a 3-source partitioning of bulk surface temperature into canopy temperature, shaded soil temperature and sunlit soil temperature was applied to both orchards and vineyards. These latter applications were made where orchards and vineyards are identified by CDL or, in California, by a state-sponsored land use system. These functions and other enhancements to the original METRIC model are described in the most current METRIC users manual (Allen et al., 2018). eeMETRIC uses the atmospherically corrected surface reflectance and LST from Landsat Collection 2 Level 2, with fallback to Collection 2 Level 1 when needed for near real-time estimates. Additional information

High resolution Red-Green-Blue (RGB) orthorectified camera images mosaicked and output onto a fixed, uniform spatial grid using nearest-neighbor resampling; spatial resolution is 0.1 m. The digital camera is part of a suite of instruments on the NEON Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) that also includes a full-waveform LiDAR system and the NEON Imaging Spectrometer. In the orthorectification process, the digital imagery is re-mapped to the same geographic projection as the LiDAR and imaging spectrometer data that is acquired simultaneously. The resulting images share the same map projection grid space as the orthorectified spectrometer and LiDAR imagery. Since the digital camera imagery is acquired at higher spatial resolution than the imaging spectrometer data, it can aid in identifying features in the spectrometer images including manmade features (e.g., roads, fence lines, and buildings) that are indicative of land-use change. Availability in GEE may not represent full availability in the NEON Data Portal (linked below). Additional sites and years can be added to GEE upon request by emailing listaopgee@battelleecology.org. See NEON Data Product DP3.30010.001 for more details. Documentation: NEON DP3.30010.001 Camera imagery mosaic Quick Start Guide Get started by exploring the Intro to AOP Data in Google Earth Engine Tutorial Series Browse and interact with AOP data in the NEON AOP GEE Data Viewer App

This dataset contains continental (Africa) land cover and impervious surface changes over a long period of time (15 years) using high resolution Landsat satellite observations and Google Earth Engine cloud computing platform. The approach applied here to overcome the computational challenges of handling big earth observation data by using cloud computing can help scientists and practitioners who lack high-performance computational resources. The dataset contains seven classes, prepared annually from 2000 to 2015, using high‐resolution Landsat 7 images (ETM+) and analyzed by Google Earth Engine cloud computing method. The model that generated the LULC classification was evaluated for predictive accuracy across classes as well as overall accuracy. The model achieved an overall accuracy of 88% with class-specific user’s and producer’s accuracies ranged from 84-94% and 79-96% respectively (Midekisa et al., 2017).

Although soil moisture is a key factor of hydrologic and climate applications, global continuous high resolution soil moisture datasets are still limited. Here we use physics-informed machine learning to generate a global, long-term, spatially continuous high resolution dataset of surface soil moisture, using International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN), remote sensing and meteorological data, guided with the knowledge of physical processes impacting soil moisture dynamics. Global Surface Soil Moisture (GSSM1km) provides surface soil moisture (0-5 cm) at 1 km spatial and daily temporal resolution over the period 2000-2020. The performance of the GSSM1km dataset is evaluated with testing and validation datasets, and via inter-comparisons with existing soil moisture products. The root mean square error of GSSM1km in testing set is 0.05 cm3/cm3, and correlation coefficient is 0.9. In terms of the feature importance, Antecedent Precipitation Evaporation Index (APEI) is the most important significant predictor among 18 predictors, followed by evaporation and longitude. GSSM1km product can support the investigation of large-scale climate extremes and long-term trend analyses. Due to the whole dataset for the global scale is too big (779GB) to deposit at once, we uploaded the data in the Netherlands to figshare. For other areas, the data is stored in Google Earth Engine (https://code.earthengine.google.com/?asset=users/qianrswaterr/GlobalSSM1km0509), and we provide codes to download our data (https://code.earthengine.google.com/4b577bb83981e1ac43fd77127cfbdb4a). Due to the dataset is exported from Google Earth Engine, the bandNames can’t display in ArcGIS, the band is displayed as band1, band2,…. Just in case other softwares also can't display, I put the bandNames in the csv file “bandNames2000-2020”.

This dataset includes three parts:(1) The mapped global annual urban dynamics (GAUD) and green recovery from 1985 to 2015 at a 30-m resolution. This part of data is organized by 10-degree grids (totally 224).Shapefiles of 10-degree grids can be found in "grids_world.zip".Urban expansion data is packaged in "urban_grid_i.zip" (i ranges from 0 to 223). Green recovery data is packaged in "green_grid_0-223.zip".Their format is GeoTiff, and for each pixel, values from 1985 to 2015 demonstrate the urbanized or green recovery year, while 0 means no data.(2) The interpreted samples of urban extent in 1985 and 2015, and urbanized year during 1985 and 2015. This part of data is for examining the accuracies of our data fusion and temporal segmentation approach. Interpreted urban extent is packaged in "Ref_tif_clip_1985.rar" and "Ref_tif_clip_2015.rar".Its format is GeoTiff, and for each pixel, value 1 means urban areas, while 0 means non-urban areas.Valid samples of urbanized year can be found in "validation_urbanized_year.xls".(3) A demo of NUACI calculation and urbanized years dectection can be found at link:https://code.earthengine.google.com/1c901129fa8c9d81b292824e8fb4ff1c22.05.2021:Solved the problem of stripe after image mosaic (grid 138)

NRTI/L3_NO2 This dataset provides near real-time high-resolution imagery of NO2 concentrations. Nitrogen oxides (NO2 and NO) are important trace gases in the Earth's atmosphere, present in both the troposphere and the stratosphere. They enter the atmosphere as a result of anthropogenic activities (notably fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning) and natural processes (wildfires, lightning, and microbiological processes in soils). Here, NO2 is used to represent concentrations of collective nitrogen oxides because during daytime, i.e. in the presence of sunlight, a photochemical cycle involving ozone (O3) converts NO into NO2 and vice versa on a timescale of minutes. The TROPOMI NO2 processing system is based on the algorithm developments for the DOMINO-2 product and for the EU QA4ECV NO2 reprocessed dataset for OMI, and has been adapted for TROPOMI. This retrieval-assimilation-modelling system uses the 3-dimensional global TM5-MP chemistry transport model at a resolution of 1x1 degree as an essential element. More information. NRTI L3 Product To make our NRTI L3 products, we use harpconvert to grid the data. Example harpconvert invocation for one tile: harpconvert --format hdf5 --hdf5-compression 9 -a 'tropospheric_NO2_column_number_density_validity>50;derive(datetime_stop {time}); bin_spatial(2001, 50.000000, 0.01, 2001, -120.000000, 0.01); keep(NO2_column_number_density,tropospheric_NO2_column_number_density, stratospheric_NO2_column_number_density,NO2_slant_column_number_density, tropopause_pressure,absorbing_aerosol_index,cloud_fraction, sensor_altitude,sensor_azimuth_angle, sensor_zenith_angle,solar_azimuth_angle,solar_zenith_angle)' S5P_NRTI_L2_NO2_20181107T013042_20181107T013542_05529_01_010200_20181107T021824.nc output.h5 Sentinel-5 Precursor Sentinel-5 Precursor is a satellite launched on 13 October 2017 by the European Space Agency to monitor air pollution. The onboard sensor is frequently referred to as Tropomi (TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument). All of the S5P datasets, except CH4, have two versions: Near Real-Time (NRTI) and Offline (OFFL). CH4 is available as OFFL only. The NRTI assets cover a smaller area than the OFFL assets, but appear more quickly after acquisition. The OFFL assets contain data from a single orbit (which, due to half the earth being dark, contains data only for a single hemisphere). Because of noise in the data, negative vertical column values are often observed in particular over clean regions or for low SO2 emissions. It is recommended not to filter these values except for outliers, i.e. for vertical columns lower than -0.001 mol/m^2. The original Sentinel 5P Level 2 (L2) data is binned by time, not by latitude/longitude. To make it possible to ingest the data into Earth Engine, each Sentinel 5P L2 product is converted to L3, keeping a single grid per orbit (that is, no aggregation across products is performed). Source products spanning the antimeridian are ingested as two Earth Engine assets, with suffixes _1 and _2. The conversion to L3 is done by the harpconvert tool using the bin_spatial operation. The source data is filtered to remove pixels with QA values less than: 80% for AER_AI 75% for the tropospheric_NO2_column_number_density band of NO2 50% for all other datasets except for O3 and SO2 The O3_TCL product is ingested directly (without running harpconvert).

Large-scale and up-to-date maps of building rooftop area (BRA) are crucial for addressing policy decisions and sustainable development. In addition, as a fine-grained indicator of human activities, BRA could contribute to urban planning and energy modeling to provide benefits to human well-being. However, existing large-scale BRA datasets, such as those from Microsoft and Google, do not include China, hence there are no full-coverage maps of BRA in China. To this end, we produce the multi-annual China building rooftop area dataset (CBRA) with 2.5 m resolution from 2016-2021 Sentinel-2 images. The CBRA is the first full-coverage and multi-annual BRA data in China. The CBRA achieves good performance with the F1 score of 62.55% (+10.61% compared with the previous BRA data in China) based on 250,000 testing samples in urban areas, and the recall of 78.94% based on 30,000 testing samples in rural areas.

The CBRA is organized as GeoTIFF (.tif) raster file format with a single band and GCS_WGS_1984 coordinate system. The pixel values are 0 and 255, with 0 representing the background and 255 representing the building rooftop area. Furthermore, to facilitate the use of the data, the CBRA is split into 215 tiles of spatial grid, named “CBRA_year_E/W**N/S**.tif”, where “year” is the sampling year, the “E/W**N/S**” is the latitude and longitude coordinates found in the upper left corner of the tile data.

Version 2.0: In version 1.0, there were empty raster images (because they didn't contain buildings). In version 2.0, these raster images were removed.

This dataset represents a high resolution urban land cover classification map across the southern California Air Basin (SoCAB) with a spatial resolution of 60 cm in urban regions and 10 m in non-urban regions. This map was developed to support NASA JPL-based urban biospheric CO2 modeling in Los Angeles, CA. Land cover classification was derived from a novel fusion of Sentinel-2 (10-60 m x 10-60 m) and 2016 NAIP (60 cm x 60 cm) imagery and provides identification of impervious surface, non-photosynthetic vegetation, shrub, tree, grass, pools and lakes.

Land Cover Classes in .tif file: 0: Impervious surface 1: Tree (mixed evergreen/deciduous) 2: Grass (assumed irrigated) 3: Shrub 4: Non-photosynthetic vegetation 5: Water (masked using MNDWI/NDWI)

Google Earth Engine interactive app displaying this map: https://wcoleman.users.earthengine.app/view/socab-irrigated-classification

A portion of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Support from the Earth Science Division OCO-2 program is acknowledged. Copyright 2020. All rights reserved.

What is SEPAL?

SEPAL (https://sepal.io/) is a free and open source cloud computing platform for geo-spatial data access and processing. It empowers users to quickly process large amounts of data on their computer or mobile device. Users can create custom analysis ready data using freely available satellite imagery, generate and improve land use maps, analyze time series, run change detection and perform accuracy assessment and area estimation, among many other functionalities in the platform. Data can be created and analyzed for any place on Earth using SEPAL.

https://data.apps.fao.org/catalog/dataset/9c4d7c45-7620-44c4-b653-fbe13eb34b65/resource/63a3efa0-08ab-4ad6-9d4a-96af7b6a99ec/download/cambodia_mosaic_2020.png" alt="alt text" title="Figure 1: Best pixel mosaic of Landsat 8 data for 2020 over Cambodia">

Figure 1: Best pixel mosaic of Landsat 8 data for 2020 over Cambodia

SEPAL reaches over 5000 users in 180 countries for the creation of custom data products from freely available satellite data. SEPAL was developed as a part of the Open Foris suite, a set of free and open source software platforms and tools that facilitate flexible and efficient data collection, analysis and reporting. SEPAL combines and integrates modern geospatial data infrastructures and supercomputing power available through Google Earth Engine and Amazon Web Services with powerful open-source data processing software, such as R, ORFEO, GDAL, Python and Jupiter Notebooks. Users can easily access the archive of satellite imagery from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) as well as high spatial and temporal resolution data from Planet Labs and turn such images into data that can be used for reporting and better decision making.

National Forest Monitoring Systems in many countries have been strengthened by SEPAL, which provides technical government staff with computing resources and cutting edge technology to accurately map and monitor their forests. The platform was originally developed for monitoring forest carbon stock and stock changes for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). The application of the tools on the platform now reach far beyond forest monitoring by providing different stakeholders access to cloud based image processing tools, remote sensing and machine learning for any application. Presently, users work on SEPAL for various applications related to land monitoring, land cover/use, land productivity, ecological zoning, ecosystem restoration monitoring, forest monitoring, near real time alerts for forest disturbances and fire, flood mapping, mapping impact of disasters, peatland rewetting status, and many others.

The Hand-in-Hand initiative enables countries that generate data through SEPAL to disseminate their data widely through the platform and to combine their data with the numerous other datasets available through Hand-in-Hand.

https://data.apps.fao.org/catalog/dataset/9c4d7c45-7620-44c4-b653-fbe13eb34b65/resource/868e59da-47b9-4736-93a9-f8d83f5731aa/download/probability_classification_over_zambia.png" alt="alt text" title="Figure 2: Image classification module for land monitoring and mapping. Probability classification over Zambia">

Figure 2: Image classification module for land monitoring and mapping. Probability classification over Zambia

This dataset contains maps of the location and temporal distribution of surface water from 1984 to 2019 and provides statistics on the extent and change of those water surfaces. For more information see the associated journal article: High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes (Nature, 2016) and the online Data Users Guide. These data were generated using 4,185,439 scenes from Landsat 5, 7, and 8 acquired between 16 March 1984 and 31 December 2019. Each pixel was individually classified into water / non-water using an expert system and the results were collated into a monthly history for the entire time period and two epochs (1984-1999, 2000-2019) for change detection. This mapping layers product consists of 1 image containing 7 bands. It maps different facets of the spatial and temporal distribution of surface water over the last 35 years. Areas where water has never been detected are masked.

Freely-available satellite data streams and the ability to process these data on cloud-computing platforms such as Google Earth Engine have made frequent, large-scale landcover mapping at high resolution a real possibility. In this paper we apply these technologies, along with machine learning, to the mapping of peatlands–a landcover class that is critical for preserving biodiversity, helping to address climate change impacts, and providing ecosystem services, e.g., carbon storage–in the Boreal Forest Natural Region of Alberta, Canada. We outline a data-driven, scientific framework that: compiles large amounts of Earth observation data sets (radar, optical, and LiDAR); examines the extracted variables for suitability in peatland modelling; optimizes model parameterization; and finally, predicts peatland occurrence across a large boreal area (397, 958 km2) of Alberta at 10 m spatial resolution (equalling 3.9 billion pixels across Alberta). The resulting peatland occurrence model shows an accuracy of 87% and a kappa statistic of 0.57 when compared to our validation data set. Differentiating peatlands from mineral wetlands achieved an accuracy of 69% and kappa statistic of 0.37. This data-driven approach is applicable at large geopolitical scales (e.g., provincial, national) for wetland and landcover inventories that support long-term, responsible resource management.

Leaf Area Index (LAI) is a fundamental vegetation structural variable that drives energy and mass exchanges between the plant and the atmosphere. Moderate-resolution (300m – 7km) global LAI data products have been widely applied to track global vegetation changes, drive Earth system models, monitor crop growth and productivity, etc. Yet, cutting-edge applications in climate adaptation, hydrology, and sustainable agriculture require LAI information at higher spatial resolution (< 100m) to model and understand heterogeneous landscapes. This dataset was built to assist a machine-learning-based approach for mapping LAI from 30m-resolution Landsat images across the contiguous US (CONUS). The data was derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Version 6 LAI/FPAR, Landsat Collection 1 surface reflectance, and NLCD Land Cover datasets over 2006 – 2018 using Google Earth Engine. Each record/sample/row includes a MODIS LAI value, corresponding Landsat surface reflectance in green, red, NIR, SWIR1 bands, a land cover (biome) type, geographic location, and other auxiliary information. Each sample represents a MODIS LAI pixel (500m) within which a single biome type dominates 90% of the area. The spatial homogeneity of the samples was further controlled by a screening process based on the coefficient of variation of the Landsat surface reflectance. In total, there are approximately 1.6 million samples, stratified by biome, Landsat sensor, and saturation status from the MODIS LAI algorithm. This dataset can be used to train machine learning models and generate LAI maps for Landsat 5, 7, 8 surface reflectance images within CONUS. Detailed information on the sample generation and quality control can be found in the related journal article. Resources in this dataset:Resource Title: README. File Name: LAI_train_samples_CONUS_README.txtResource Description: Description and metadata of the main datasetResource Software Recommended: Notepad,url: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-notepad/9msmlrh6lzf3?activetab=pivot:overviewtab Resource Title: LAI_training_samples_CONUS. File Name: LAI_train_samples_CONUS_v0.1.1.csvResource Description: This CSV file consists of the training samples for estimating Leaf Area Index based on Landsat surface reflectance images (Collection 1 Tire 1). Each sample has a MODIS LAI value and corresponding surface reflectance derived from Landsat pixels within the MODIS pixel. Contact: Yanghui Kang (kangyanghui@gmail.com)
Column description

UID: Unique identifier. Format: LATITUDE_LONGITUDE_SENSOR_PATHROW_DATE
Landsat_ID: Landsat image ID Date: Landsat image date in "YYYYMMDD" Latitude: Latitude (WGS84) of the MODIS LAI pixel center Longitude: Longitude (WGS84) of the MODIS LAI pixel center MODIS_LAI: MODIS LAI value in "m2/m2" MODIS_LAI_std: MODIS LAI standard deviation in "m2/m2" MODIS_LAI_sat: 0 - MODIS Main (RT) method used no saturation; 1 - MODIS Main (RT) method with saturation NLCD_class: Majority class code from the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) NLCD_frequency: Percentage of the area cover by the majority class from NLCD Biome: Biome type code mapped from NLCD (see below for more information) Blue: Landsat surface reflectance in the blue band Green: Landsat surface reflectance in the green band Red: Landsat surface reflectance in the red band Nir: Landsat surface reflectance in the near infrared band Swir1: Landsat surface reflectance in the shortwave infrared 1 band Swir2: Landsat surface reflectance in the shortwave infrared 2 band Sun_zenith: Solar zenith angle from the Landsat image metadata. This is a scene-level value. Sun_azimuth: Solar azimuth angle from the Landsat image metadata. This is a scene-level value. NDVI: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index computed from Landsat surface reflectance EVI: Enhanced Vegetation Index computed from Landsat surface reflectance NDWI: Normalized Difference Water Index computed from Landsat surface reflectance GCI: Green Chlorophyll Index = Nir/Green - 1

Biome code

1 - Deciduous Forest
2 - Evergreen Forest
3 - Mixed Forest
4 - Shrubland
5 - Grassland/Pasture
6 - Cropland
7 - Woody Wetland
8 - Herbaceous Wetland

Reference Dataset: All data was accessed through Google Earth Engine Gorelick, N., Hancher, M., Dixon, M., Ilyushchenko, S., Thau, D., & Moore, R. (2017). Google Earth Engine: Planetary-scale geospatial analysis for everyone. Remote Sensing of Environment. MODIS Version 6 Leaf Area Index/FPAR 4-day L5 Global 500m Myneni, R., Y. Knyazikhin, T. Park. MOD15A2H MODIS/Terra Leaf Area Index/FPAR 8-Day L4 Global 500m SIN Grid V006. 2015, distributed by NASA EOSDIS Land Processes DAAC, https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD15A2H.006 Landsat 5/7/8 Collection 1 Surface Reflectance Landsat Level-2 Surface Reflectance Science Product courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. Masek, J.G., Vermote, E.F., Saleous N.E., Wolfe, R., Hall, F.G., Huemmrich, K.F., Gao, F., Kutler, J., and Lim, T-K. (2006). A Landsat surface reflectance dataset for North America, 1990–2000. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters 3(1):68-72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/LGRS.2005.857030. Vermote, E., Justice, C., Claverie, M., & Franch, B. (2016). Preliminary analysis of the performance of the Landsat 8/OLI land surface reflectance product. Remote Sensing of Environment. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2016.04.008. National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) Yang, Limin, Jin, Suming, Danielson, Patrick, Homer, Collin G., Gass, L., Bender, S.M., Case, Adam, Costello, C., Dewitz, Jon A., Fry, Joyce A., Funk, M., Granneman, Brian J., Liknes, G.C., Rigge, Matthew B., Xian, George, A new generation of the United States National Land Cover Database—Requirements, research priorities, design, and implementation strategies: ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, v. 146, p. 108–123, at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2018.09.006 Resource Software Recommended: Microsoft Excel,url: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/excel

The warming-wetting climates in Chinese drylands, together with a series of ecological engineering projects, had caused apparent changes to vegetation therein. Regarding the vegetation greening trend, different remote sensing data had yielded distinct findings. It was critical to evaluate vegetation dynamics in Chinese drylands using a series of remote sensing data. By comparing the three most commonly used remote sensing datasets [i.e., MODIS, Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), and Landsat], this study comprehensively investigated vegetation dynamics for Chinse drylands. All three remote sensing datasets exhibited evident vegetation greening trends from 2000 to 2020 in Chinese drylands, especially in the Loess Plateau and Northeast China. However, Landsat identified the largest greening areas (89.8%), while AVHRR identified the smallest greening area (58%). The vegetation greening areas identified by Landsat comprise more small patches than those identified by MODIS and AVHRR. The MODIS data exhibited a higher consistency with Landsat than with AVHRR in terms of detecting vegetation greening areas. The three datasets exhibited high consistency in identifying vegetation greening in Northeast China, Loess Plateau, and Xinjiang. The percentage of inconsistent areas among the three datasets was 39.56%. The vegetation greening areas identified by Landsat comprised more small patches. Sensors and the atmospheric effect are the two main reasons responsible for the different outputs from each NDVI product. Ecological engineering projects had a great promotion effect on vegetation greening, which can be detected by the three NDVI datasets in Chinese drylands, thereby combating desertification and reducing dust storms.

This dataset time series of surface water area for 71208 reservoirs globally derived from optical Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery acquired during 1985 - 2021, the validation dataset, and the source code used to produce and validate these time series.

See

Introduction:

The GLOW-S dataset provides a comprehensive record of global river widths, captured with high-resolution Sentinel-2 imagery. This dataset focuses on delivering an enhanced spatial and temporal analysis of river widths, suitable for diverse hydrological and environmental studies.

Data Collection and Processing:

Image Source: River width data were extracted from Sentinel-2 satellite imagery accessed via Google Earth Engine, utilizing higher resolution capabilities than previous datasets based on Landsat.

Extraction Methodology: Following validated methods from prior research (Feng et al., 2019; 2022), the dataset involves:

Identification of rivers observable in Sentinel-2 images.

Construction of cross-sections for width extraction.

Application of quality filters on images to ensure accuracy in width measurements.

Determination of water extent and subsequent river width calculation at each cross-section for images spanning 2017 to 2022.

Dataset Features:

Temporal Coverage: Data spans from 2017 to 2022, capturing seasonal and interannual variations in river width.

Spatial Resolution: Utilizes the superior spatial resolution of 10m from Sentinel-2 for detailed river width analysis.

Postprocessing: When multiple observations for the same cross-section and date exist, the dataset averages these widths to enhance usability.

Column names:

riverID (cross section identifier): RXS

date (image capture date): YYYY-MM-DD

width (river width captured in meters)

Additional data: The shapefiles of cross sections are also attached alongside.

The World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 2019 is a 10m resolution binary mask outlining the extent of human settlements globally derived by means of 2019 multitemporal Sentinel-1 (S1) and Sentinel-2 (S2) imagery. Based on the hypothesis that settlements generally show a more stable behavior with respect to most land-cover classes, temporal statistics are calculated for both S1- and S2-based indices. In particular, a comprehensive analysis has been performed by exploiting a number of reference building outlines to identify the most suitable set of temporal features (ultimately including 6 from S1 and 25 from S2). Training points for the settlement and non-settlement class are then generated by thresholding specific features, which varies depending on the 30 climate types of the well-established Köppen Geiger scheme. Next, binary classification based on Random Forest is applied and, finally, a dedicated post-processing is performed where ancillary datasets are employed to further reduce omission and commission errors. Here, the whole classification process has been entirely carried out within the Google Earth Engine platform. To assess the high accuracy and reliability of the WSF2019, two independent crowd-sourcing-based validation exercises have been carried out with the support of Google and Mapswipe, respectively, where overall 1M reference labels have been collected based photointerpretation of very high-resolution optical imagery. Starting backwards from the year 2015 - for which the WSF2015 is used as a reference - settlement and non-settlement training samples for the given target year t are iteratively extracted by applying morphological filtering to the settlement mask derived for the year t+1, as well as excluding potentially mislabeled samples by adaptively thresholding the temporal mean NDBI, MNDWI and NDVI. Finally, binary Random Forest classification in performed. To quantitatively assess the high accuracy and reliability of the dataset, an extensive campaign based on crowdsourcing photointerpretation of very high-resolution airborne and satellite historical imagery has been performed with the support of Google. In particular, for the years 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015, ~200K reference cells of 30x30m size distributed over 100 sites around the world have been labelled, hence summing up to overall ~1.2M validation samples. It is worth noting that past Landsat-5/7 availability considerably varies across the world and over time. Independently from the implemented approach, this might then result in a lower quality of the final product where few/no scenes have been collected. Accordingly, to provide the users with a suitable and intuitive measure that accounts for the goodness of the Landsat imagery, we conceived the Input Data Consistency (IDC) score, which ranges from 6 to 1 with: 6) very good; 5) good; 4) fair; 3) moderate; 2) low; 1) very low. The IDC score is available on a yearly basis between 1985 and 2015 and supports a proper interpretation of the WSF evolution product. The WSF evolution and IDC score datasets are organized in 5138 GeoTIFF files (EPSG4326 projection) each one referring to a portion of 2x2 degree size (~222x222km) on the ground. WSF evolution values range between 1985 and 2015 corresponding to the estimated year of settlement detection, whereas 0 is no data. A comprehensive publication with all technical details and accuracy figures is currently being finalized. For the time being, please refer to Marconcini et al,. 2021.