A new tool co-developed by Google Earth Engine and the World Resources Institute is being billed as the planet’s most up-to-date and high-resolution global land cover mapping data set, giving unprecedented levels of detail about how land is being used around the world.
The launch of the tool marks a big step forward in enabling
organizations and governments to make better science-based, data-informed
decisions about urgent planetary challenges, the developers say. Named Dynamic
World, it merges cloud-based artificial intelligence with satellite imagery to
give near-real-time global visualizations of nine types of land use and land
cover.
The tool is likely to be important for a variety of
purposes, the developers say, such as monitoring the progress of ecosystem
restoration goals, assessing the effectiveness of protected areas, creating
sustainable food systems, and alerting land managers to unforeseen land changes
like deforestation and fires.
Google and the World Resources Institute (WRI) last week
announced the launch of a new mapping tool touted as providing an unprecedented
level of detail about how land is being used around the world. Called Dynamic
World, it’s said to be the first global land cover data set available in
near-real-time at high resolution. “It’s a new frontier in global,
high-resolution, near-real-time environmental monitoring,” Rebecca Moore,
director of Google Earth, said at an online press launch on June 6.
Powered by Google Earth Engine’s cloud-based artificial
intelligence, Dynamic World uses satellite imagery with a resolution of 10 by
10 meters (33 by 33 feet) from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2
satellites to reveal up-to-date coverage of a suite of different land and water
types, including urban development, wetlands, forests, crops and trees.
Dynamic World map
While satellite images are typically processed as soon as
they become available, up until now, global land cover maps often take months
to produce, and are updated only on a monthly or annual basis. As a result,
decision-makers at times lack timely data that could lead to rapid actions to
address environmental disturbances, such as unprecedented changes to seasonal
ecosystem cycles, the impacts of storms, floods and fires, or human
disturbances like illegal logging.
“We’ve heard from a number of governments and researchers
that they’re committed to taking action … but they’re lacking critical
environmental monitoring information that they need [in order] to understand
what’s happening on the ground,” Moore said. She added that the level of detail
available through Dynamic World will now enable scientists and policymakers to
rapidly detect and quantify the extent of environmental change anywhere on
Earth.
A new study about the tool, published June 9 in Scientific
Data, says Dynamic World’s features will “enable unprecedented flexibility for
a diverse community of users across a variety of disciplines.”
The Dynamic World tool leverages the systematic orbit of the
ESA’s Sentinel-2 satellites, which collect imagery of the entire globe every
five days at the equator and every two to three days at mid-latitudes,
amounting to more than 5,000 images per day. These are streamed into the Google
Earth Engine’s AI platform for analysis.
As new satellite images become available, the AI system
classifies land cover types in near-real-time by detecting combinations of nine
different land cover types — water, flooded vegetation, built-up areas, trees,
crops, bare ground, grass, shrub/scrub, and snow/ice — in the images and
calculating which types are most representative within each 10-by-10-meter
pixel.
The continual updates mean the data set is extremely
up-to-date, and users can also compare land-use maps for specific areas across
chosen time periods between 2015 and two days ago. The data set is open-access
and freely available on monitoring platforms Google Earth Engine and Resource
Watch.
Speaking at the launch event, Craig Hanson, vice president
of food, forests, water and the ocean at the World Resources Institute, said
the new tool will enable public, private and nonprofit groups to make wiser
decisions to protect, manage and restore our forests, nature and ecosystems, as
well as create sustainable food systems and alert people to unforeseen changes
to land.
“This is particularly important because we live in a world
facing great land squeeze,” Hanson said. “The world is experiencing growing
demand for food, for timber, for bioenergy, for urban expansion. All the while,
we need to be conserving land for nature, biodiversity and climate.”
Unlike most land cover platforms, which typically display a
static view of locations, Dynamic World displays “the pulsation of life”
throughout the year, Hanson said, making it useful for understanding
longer-term trends of seasonal ecosystem change. For example, as landscapes are
seasonally flooded, the land cover can switch from grassland or trees to
wetland and water. In agricultural landscapes, Dynamic World is able to detect
the presence and proliferation of agroforestry systems, which would have once
been classified simply as cropland.
“Given the importance of restoration for the global agenda,
such monitoring abilities are increasingly important and valuable, and will
empower government, NGO and village efforts to advance restoration of their
landscapes,” Hanson said.
by Carolyn Cowan on 9 June 2022. www.mongabay.com.
Study: Brown, C. F., Brumby, S. P., Guzder-Williams, B.,
Birch, T., Brooks Hyde, S., Mazzariello, J., … Tait, A. M. (2022). Dynamic
World, Near real-time global 10 m land use land cover mapping. Scientific Data,
9(1), 251. doi: 10.1038/s41597-022-01307-4
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