Tim Newman, Head of Product at Earth Blox, shares the highlights and key product updates for Earth Engine, Google Earth and the Google Maps Platform from the Geo for Good Summit 2023.
October 10th, Mountain View, CA
When billboards start advertising APIs rather than cars, you know you must be approaching the tech world’s centre of gravity. For one week each year, Google’s Geo for Good Summit also pulls in hundreds of the world’s leading technologists, environmentalists and remote sensing specialists who are all using geospatial tech to address the world’s most pressing environmental and social problems.
The days begin early with a fantastic, al-fresco breakfast (the Google team deserve a lot of credit for their wonderful hospitality from start to finish), then the sessions begin. They range from the instructional to the informative and the inspiring. In-between sessions, over coffee or lunch, sparks of collaboration fly, and it's no surprise that many long-term projects are born or incubated at Geo for Good each year.
As the conference covers big planetary problems, but also innovative solutions, it’s easy to swing from pessimism to hope many times per day; but the conference’s bias is definitely for action and optimism. The huge threat of melting permafrost highlighted by Brendan Rogers from the Woodwell Climate Research Center is enough to keep anyone up at night, but the feasible actions that we can take on methane, and the big advances in how we can monitor it with MethaneSAT, shared by Millie Chu Baird, show that change is possible.
What were the main updates announced?
Google Earth Engine
- Cloud Score+ is Google’s own pixel-level quality assessment which gives a ‘usability’ score to each pixel of Sentinel-2. While the output is simple (a score from 0 to 1, where 1 is completely clear, and 0 is occluded), the process to make it isn’t! Anyone who’s ever tried to make a cloud free composite using Sentinel-2 will be very excited to get their hands on this - and the results are impressive.
- Publisher and Community Data Catalogs: In addition to the 100 new datasets added to the main Google Earth Engine Catalog (which now sits at an eye-watering 90PB), there are now links to ‘Publisher’ and ‘Community’ catalogs. The Publisher Catalogs are curated by those publishing the data (currently Planet, and Geoscience Australia), whereas datasets in the Community Data Catalog come, unsurprisingly, from the Google Earth Engine community. Currently this includes a selection from the Awesome GEE Community Catalog which we recently contributed to, adding the Biodiversity Intactness dataset, built by Impact Observatory and Vizzuality, to power biodiversity solutions.
- Easier Integrations with BigQuery and Vertex AI pave the way for Google Earth Engine data to underpin a wider range of geospatial analyses and machine learning models.
- Better support for Python given its importance to the data science community.
- A suite of Data Extraction APIs which we’ll explore in a more technical deep-dive.
Google Earth
The big news this year is the release of Google Earth 10, which has had a complete redesign and sits on a new tech stack. Some of the biggest improvements include collaboration tools which work across web and mobile.
Google Maps Platform
Google has introduced a new “Environment” category (sitting alongside “Maps”, “Routes” and “Places”). This category includes three new APIs - providing insight into Air Quality, Pollen and Solar potential.
Missed Geo for Good this year?
If this sounds up your street, then don’t despair - there are plenty of ways to catch up:
- Sessions: Almost all sessions are recorded, and will be made available on the Geo for Good Website over the next couple of weeks.
- Contacts: If you find yourself with a burning question or want to collaborate with those presenting, then drop them a message - it’s rare to find such a bunch of collaborative and helpful people (attendees and Googlers alike), so I’m sure you’ll get a response.
- Food: Sadly there’s no way to recreate this after the event.
Ultimately, the conference demonstrated that when the barriers to accessing, processing and sharing data are removed, and the capabilities of powerful geospatial technology is put in the hands of the right people, then exciting things can and do happen.
This is why we’re so proud at Earth Blox to partner closely with Google. Earth Engine and the Google team have done so much to systematically remove barriers to planetary data and cloud geography, empowering people and organisations around the world to make the best decisions for our planet: and this is a mission we share. This is work that happens year round, but is epitomised for three days a year in the hectic, inspiring, and challenging conference that is Geo for Good.
Tim Newman
Tim Newman is Head of Product at Earth Blox. He spent eight years at Ordnance Survey where he oversaw a 5X increase in subscriber numbers for the OS Maps consumer app. Tim holds a Master's degree in Chemistry (Oxon) and an MSc in Polar and Alpine Change from Sheffield University.