Following on from Geo for Good 2022, Professor Iain H Woodhouse, Knowledge and Outreach Lead at Earth Blox, shared updates from Google’s annual event for the changemakers making a positive impact in the world on Geoawesomeness. Here's an extract.
Every year, at the Geo for Good Summit, Google brings together nonprofits, scientists and other changemakers who want to leverage their technology and mapping tools such as Google Earth, Earth Engine, Environmental Insights Explorer, and My Maps for positive social and environmental projects. The event has been running since 2011, and for the last two years, was held online due to the pandemic. This year, the event was a hybrid, with some 300 delegates coming together in-person in Mountain View, California and over 2,000 joining in online from around the world.
Geo for Good combines plenary sessions, workshops, demo stations and panel discussions delivered by a wide range of experts from Google and the community. So what did we learn? Below are my key takeaways from the event.
Geo Product updates – what’s new in Google Earth, MyMaps, Earth Engine and Environmental Insights Explorer
The latest update from Google Earth included news about a forthcoming new UI that will support better data management and editing. And combined with new cross-platform interoperability, it is going to be even easier than ever to use GE in the field. This includes being able to easily upload photos and location, wherever you are.
MyMaps is Google’s lightweight mapping tool to make it easy to make maps, import Sheets data and share with others. It is now possible to sync between Sheets and Maps so they can be kept updated, and merging multiple datasets is now easier than ever.
And for Earth Engine (apart from the big news of the year about them moving to a commercial offering) the key updates were in the new data added to the catalogue. This includes data from the new Landsat 9 continuing the multi-decade Landsat dataset, additional data from the canopy laser scanner on the ISS, GEDI ( L4B 1km gridded biomass and L2A top height) and the new inclusion of the Dynamic World land classification layer. Dynamic World is updated with every Sentinel 2 image acquisition, and provides a % probability that a pixel lies within one of the 9 classes. Built in collaboration with WRI, this 10m resolution data layer can be used as a land cover classification layer “as is”, but it can also be used as an input layer to create new locally-specific land cover classifications. Incredibly powerful, and it will be amazing to see its full potential, especially when we include it within Earth Blox.
Finally, we also saw an introduction to the new Google Environmental Insights Explorer. This is designed to help city planners adapt to low carbon economies by tracking carbon emission inventories. It incorporates transport and building emissions (using Google Maps data) and calculates the total solar rooftop potential of buildings inside a city. They have now expanded the building coverage to 14,000 cities for as much as four years of historical data for some cities. The most recent addition (for some cities) is a tree canopy map for tracking urban trees.
Read the rest of the article, covering impacts, Earth Engine for non-coders, and diversity and inclusion over on Geoawesomeness.