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Google Earth Engine is a powerful platform for analyzing and visualizing changes in land use and land cover over time. In this session we will use Timelapse, Global Forest Watch, Surface Water Explorer, and other tools that were built on the Earth Engine platform in hands-on activities to create animations and conduct analyses. Participants will investigate the impact of fires and floods, learn to use the tools to quantify change, and explore ways to use the tools in their own work. We will also introduce a series of on-demand activities that will help participants learn how to access the full power of Earth Engine for their own work.
If you would like to learn how to create your own visualizations in Earth Engine, we have a three hour tutorial from IMW 2021 click here
Activity #1
Activity #1
We will begin by looking at how the Google platform can be used to visualize fires in Lake County, California, where a nonprofit, The Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance (TERA), is working to return cultural burning. For this session, our workshop example demonstrates how to use Google Earth Engine tools such as Timelapse, Global Forest Watch and the MBTS Data Explorer, to analyze burn scars and tree loss.
Activity #2
Activity #2
For this activity we will explore user friendly tools built on the Earth Engine platform.
Click on the links to the right to find Earth Engine tools that will help you look at tree loss, fires, floods, marine fishing activity and more.
When you open one of the tools, take a look at your community and see if any of the tools will help you with your work.
You can export a PDF or image file from most tools, or you can take a screenshot of the map. The animation below was created by making a screen recording and uploading it to a free online GIF maker.
Many of the tools also provide a dashboard which will give you analytical tools. For example, Global Forest Watch will analyze the changes in tree cover over time and give you graphs that you can use in your work.
As an example of what you can do with these tools, this image shows the development of burn scars from fires in Lake County, California from 2001-2021 using Global Forest Watch.
An animation like this can be very effective in showing your community what is happening to their land in this time of climate change.
Activity #3
Activity #3
For this final activity we will actually take a look under the hood and see what Earth engine is really like. To do this activity, the Earth Engine code editor will prompt you to sign up for an Earth Engine account which is free.
If you wish to do your own analyses from scratch you will need some knowledge of coding (tutorial click here) - but we can take a look at map collections that have been created by others and see what Earth Engine code looks like without writing any code ourselves. You can find all of the available map layers in the Data Catalog at https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets
The easiest thing to do is search for things that might interest you on this page https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog
You can search by typing something into the box that says "Filter list of datasets". For example, if you type in "fire" you can find the example below, which is a map of all the potential fires in the world identified on a monthly basis.
Go to https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/MODIS_061_MCD64A1
Scroll down the page, and under the code you will find the blue button that says Open in Code Editor.
When you click it, you will open a browser window with the Earth Engine Code Editor.
Now you will see the script in the middle pane on the top of the Code Editor.
You will need to click the "run" button to see the map layer.
Use the navigation tools in the upper left corner of the map to zoom in and out; add points lines and polygons.
Change the base map using the buttons in the upper right corner of the map.
2022IMW| Google Technical Session 3.mp4Report abuse