Google introduces online tool to monitor Earth’s land cover

Google has introduced Dynamic World, an online tool that provides detailed and up-to-date information about the Earth’s land cover. Dynamic World should enable better monitoring of ecosystems and changes in the earth’s surface.

The online tool developed through Google Earth Engine and Google’s AI Platform, it allows scientists to take a closer look at and monitor the land cover of our planet. A distinction is made between nine different land cover categories: water, flooded vegetation, built-up areas, trees, crops, bare ground, grass, scrub and ice. Google states that it can indicate which land cover is present every ten meters on the map using artificial intelligence.

The tool is updated every two to five days with more than 5,000 satellite images from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite. The images and data that users can request via Dynamic World date back to June 2015. As a result, the according to Google allow scientists and policy makers to better understand changes in land cover from the recent past and their impacts.

Dynamic World section of Flanders and the Netherlands