SIG and its partners created Collect Earth Online (CEO), a free, open-source system for viewing and interpreting high-resolution satellite imagery. The projection is a collaboration with NASA SERVIR, SilvaCarbon, the USDA Forest Service, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The codebase is shared through the FAO’s Open Foris initiative, which promotes flexible and efficient data collection, analysis, and reporting.
CEO’s powerful, cloud-based technology simplifies a process that had been fragmented and required multiple stakeholders. With CEO, users can inspect any location on Earth with satellite data and track land use and landscape changes over time. Users can conduct surveys, collect samples, and make use of crowdsourcing technology—all at no cost. CEO provides access to historical imagery and mosaics from NASA’s Landsat network, the European Union’s Sentinel system, Google Earth Engine. One of its most valued features is date-stamped imagery of the tropics generated monthly by Planet and made available through Norway’s International Climate & Forests Initiative (NICFI). Armed with the consistent, reliable land use data they need, users can more easily monitor quickly changing landscapes, develop policies to protect land, and prevent deforestation.
We have collaborated with FAO on the development of tools and modules comprising the OpenForis suite of free and open source tools. The two co-developed tools include Collect Earth Online, an image attribution platform, and SEPAL, a geospatial cloud computing platform. Collect Earth Online is a system for viewing and interpreting high-resolution satellite imagery. It enables users to efficiently collect up-to-date information about their environment and observe changes over time. Organizations around the world use CEO to detect deforestation, forest degradation, and other changes in the landscape. A module in sepal that we have co-developed is the restoration planning tool, se.plan. It identifies areas with high potential for restoration projects, based on a cost-benefit ratio. It integrates socio-economic data to calculate the costs of forest restoration, as well as restoration priorities that can be ranked according to their importance.
“Collect Earth Online (CEO) is a custom built, open-source, satellite image viewing and interpretation system developed by SERVIR, FAO, and other partners as a tool for use in projects that require land cover and/or land use data. CEO promotes consistency in locating, interpreting, and labeling reference data plots for use in classifying and monitoring land cover / land use change. The full functionality of CEO, including collaborative compilation of reference point databases, is implemented online so there is no need for desktop installation. The CEO codebase is shared through the Open Foris Initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
CEO provides an intuitive, web-based data collection interface that enables multiple users to contribute to labeling the landscape for monitoring and classification purposes. To start, users create projects that bring together multiple sources of imagery of the earth’s surface. Next, they can pair imagery with a customizable labeling questionnaire, which allows other users to contribute data. Crowdsourcing data (or leveraging ‘community science’), enables users to collect large amounts of data quickly to answer important questions such as “Is this land forested?” or “Do you see evidence of a mine in this location?”. “
Collect Earth Online (CEO), is a free, open-source system for viewing and interpreting high-resolution satellite imagery. It enables users to efficiently collect up-to-date information about their environment and observe changes over time. Organizations around the world use CEO to detect deforestation, forest degradation, and other changes in the landscape. This data empowers users to implement policies to protect the landscape, mitigate climate change, and promote sustainable livelihoods.
“SIG and its partners created Collect Earth Online (CEO), a free, open-source system for viewing and interpreting high-resolution satellite imagery. The projection is a collaboration with NASA SERVIR, SilvaCarbon, the USDA Forest Service, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The codebase is shared through the FAO’s Open Foris initiative, which promotes flexible and efficient data collection, analysis, and reporting.
CEO’s powerful, cloud-based technology simplifies a process that had been fragmented and required multiple stakeholders. With CEO, users can inspect any location on Earth with satellite data and track land use and landscape changes over time. Users can conduct surveys, collect samples, and make use of crowdsourcing technology—all at no cost. CEO provides access to historical imagery and mosaics from NASA’s Landsat network, the European Union’s Sentinel system, Google Earth Engine. One of its most valued features is date-stamped imagery of the tropics generated monthly by Planet and made available through Norway’s International Climate & Forests Initiative (NICFI).
Armed with the consistent, reliable land use data they need, users can more easily monitor quickly changing landscapes, develop policies to protect land, and prevent deforestation.