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New tool shows data on environmental trends
Earth Map, a new data tool, launched by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and Google in September 2020, is an innovative and free-to-use web-based tool to provide efficient, rapid, inexpensive and analytically cogent insights, drawn from satellites as well as FAO's considerable wealth of agriculturally relevant data, with a few clicks on a computer.
Its development follows the successful Collect Earth platform jointly developed with Google under FAO's OpenForis suite of tools, which has already proven useful for forest assessments; land cover assessments and project design and implementation.
Earth Map makes available multi-temporal and quasi real-time satellite imagery and geospatial data sets that drive Google Earth Engine and complements them with more planetary-scale analytical capabilities, allowing for detection, quantification and monitoring of changes and trends on the Earth's surface.
It does so in a way that does not require users to master sophisticate coding techniques, thereby mitigating bottlenecks in terms of technical capacities of developing states and ultimately paving the way for smallholders to contribute to and also access critical knowledge to sustain their livelihoods.
Google and FAO began their partnership in 2015, signing an agreement on the sidelines of the Paris Agreement. Initial efforts focused on forest and crop cover mapping techniques, and they are now rapidly extending to areas such as biodiversity conservation, pest control and water management.
Buoyed by funding from the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety's International Climate Initiative, Earth Map offers data ranging from temperature to precipitation, population, vegetation, evapotranspiration, elevation and soil, and other topics.
(FAO/ile)
Read more at FAO website
Visit Earth Map website
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