Google helps save forests with Google Earth Engine

Coinciding with the Climate Change Conference being held these days in Cancun (Mexico), Google has launched the platformGoogle Earth Engine, which puts on the web a number of current and historical satellite images, many of them unpublished, including complete information from the Landsat satellite for the last 25 years. It also allows scientists to use the huge computing infrastructure that Google’s “cloud” represents to analyze that data.

According to the company, until now, environmental analysis was mostly done independently, on personal computers. The new platform offers tools that make analysis easier, such as the ability to layer data, which removes the clutter of clouds in real-time satellite imagery. Additionally, it enables collaboration and standardization by creating acommon platform for global data analysis.

Among other applications, Google Earth Engine can be used to monitor, report and verify (MRV) theinitiatives that seek to stop deforestation around the planet, one of the issues that will be discussed until next December 10 at the XVI Conference of the Parties of the UN on Climate Change (COP16). “Scientific analysts will be able to transform these images of a set of pixels into useful information about the places and the extent of the planet’s forests, detecting how our forests change over time,” explained Rebecca Moore, chief engineer of the project. Deforestation generatesbetween 12% and 18% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. The world loses 13 million hectares of forests and jungles every year, which is equivalent to the area of Greece.