Earth Map

Summary

Earth Map (earthmap.org) is a web-based FAO-Google tool for quick multi-temporal analysis of environment and climate parameters for evidence-based policies integrating cloud technologies and freely available datasets. Earth Map can analyse and display data that are already present in Google Earth Engine (earthengine.google.com) as other freely available datasets that have been gathered, processed and uploaded to the platform.

Data domains range from temperature to precipitation, fires, population, vegetation, evapotranspiration, water, land use/cover, elevation, soil, satellite images, etc. Most of the data include multi-temporal series allowing to have a time machine for several environmental parameters.

Earth Map aims to lower the access to some feature of Earth Engine through a simple graphical interface with drop-down menus. Any user can run environmental and climatic analysis on their area of interest and in a matter of few seconds.

Application

Users without prior experience in GIS or remote sensing, but with knowledge of the land to be analysed, can use Earth Map to produce images, tables and statistics describing the environmental and climatic context and history of an area. Therefore, Earth Map can play a strategic role in providing guidance in project design but also in project monitoring and final evaluation.

Even in countries where data appear to be scarce, the remote-sensing data in Earth Engine are integrated with additional freely available datasets to provide timely analysis, customized for the objectives of the projects. The tool allows to gather an in-depth multi-temporal perspective of the environmental and climatic conditions with a focus on the study of the anomalies and their frequency.

Background

Earth Map has been developed in the framework of the FAO-Google partnership, in synergy with the FAO Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform and thanks to the support of the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU). The team behind Earth Map is the same team that developed Collect Earth (www.openforis.org/tools/collect-earth.html) and it is still maintaining it; Collect Earth is another FAO-Google application to produce detailed statistics of land use, land use change and forest through a point sampling approach and freely available remote sensing data.