“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 to understand what’s happening on the ground,” Moore said. 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.
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. A Dynamic World land use land cover map showing distinct classification of different land cover types. 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. “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. Called Dynamic World, it’s said to be the first global land cover data set available in near-real-time at high resolution. Google and the World Resources Institute (WRI) this 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. 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.
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 launch of the tool this week 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.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.
0 kommentar(er)
