Today at the United Nations’ conference on climate change COP 16 in Cancun, Mexico Google.org introduced its latest philanthropic project, the Google rth Engine— an analytics tool for rth scientists and conservationists especially.
Google.org dubs their product “a planetary-scale platform for environmental data & analysis.” A product web page said:
The Google rth Engine brings together the world’s satellite ry—trillions of scientific msurements dating back more than 25 yrs—and makes it available online with tools for scientists, independent resrchers, and nations to mine [a] massive warehouse of data to detect changes, map trends and quantify differences to the rth’s surface…The srch lder also introduced the Google rth Engine API— only available to approved partners at this time— to help resrchers develop, access and run aorithms on the full rth Engine data archive, using Google’s parallel processing platform.
Some rly Google rth Engine partners mapped surface water in the Congo and crted a granular map of Mexico’s forest cover and water. One scientist, Carlos Souza Jr. of IMAZON, the Amazon Institute of People and the Environment, a non-profit resrch entity, took original satellite ry of Surui indious territory in the southern Brazilian Amazon (, above) then analyzed it using Google rth Engine to revl forest damage in the region (, below).
Google envisions their rth Engine and API advancing a of monitoring, reporting and verifiion efforts. Results could be: maps that show where ecosystem services exist and gaps where they are needed, reports that find and illustrate changes in the rth’s surface over time, and visualization of land use trends as agricultural activity shifts in response to water shortages, rising s levels, and other problems that result from climate change.
Countries are rallying to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing nations at COP 16 this yr. Hlthy trees and forests abate climate change, keep the air clner and food supplies stronger, according to the United States Forest Service.Developing nations are (and have alrdy been) most negatively effected by a rise in global temperatures as Kofi Annan, the former U.N. chief and Nobel Prize winner attests here. Keeping forests hlthy in these regions could have a nr-term beneficial impact.In light of the COP 16 initiative, Google plans to donate “10 million CPU-hours a yr over the next 2 yrs on the Google rth Engine platform, to strengthen the capacity of developing world nations to track the state of their forests,” the company announced today.s via Google rth Engine
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