Earth Map is an innovative, free and open-source tool developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in the framework of the FAO – Google partnership. It was created to support countries, research institutes and even farmers with internet access to monitor their land in an easy, integrated and multi-temporal manner. It allows everyone to visualize, process and analyze satellite imagery and global datasets on climate, vegetation, fires, biodiversity, geo-social and other topics. Users need no prior knowledge of remote sensing or Geographical Information Systems (GIS).

You can use this tool directly through EarthMap.org

Its features are based on Google Earth Engine’s big data capabilities, allowing users to undertake complex analysis of earth observation, environmental and climate data in a simple manner.

Earth Map’s data is divided into thematic groups (Climate, Geosocial, Vegetation, Land Degradation Neutrality, Water, Satellite images, Land maps, Forestry, Fire, Geophysical, Soil and Biodiversity) and allows the user to visualize layers (maps) and to generate statistics to describe the areas of interest. Some of these layers (such as the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative Land Cover, the Copernicus ECMWF Temperature and Precipitation ERA5 data, the Global Forest Change tree cover loss, Nightlights, and others) allow users to access multiple time periods. Earth Map thereby gives users both a temporal (accessing time series data) and a spatial (visualizing maps) perspective to their areas of interest.

Google Earth Engine (a cloud service with access to petabytes of information) gives Earth Map the capacity to run statistics on the fly on several metrics like temperature, precipitation, burned areas, tree-covered area, among others. These statistics can be executed on any device in a matter of seconds, regardless of the device’s computational power. Statistics can be aggregated at different time frames (yearly, monthly averages and monthly time series) and different time periods.

You can find more information about Earth Map from the paper “Earth Map: A Novel Tool for Fast Performance of Advanced Land Monitoring and Climate Assessment” DOI: 10.34133/remotesensing.000

To learn more about Google Earth Engine engine capabilities visit the developers site.

Earth Map is deployed on a Firebase instance.

Earth Map is open source. It’s hosted, developed, and maintained on GitHub.