This is the finest-scale forest map produced of Mexico to date.

Theyve funded the U.S. Geological Survey to scale their infrastructure and accelerate bringing historic Landsat data off tape, and online, through Google Earth Engine.This animation shows the breadth and depth of the moncler newest coat black Landsat archive that has been uploaded into Google Earth Engine to date. We are grateful to the USGS for their ongoing technical collaboration.Support from the Moore Foundation includes funding for several scientists to develop and integrate their desktop software to work online with the data available in Google Earth Engine. Those scientistsGreg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Carlos Souza of Imazonare also key partners, along with Matt Hansen of the Geographic Information Science Center at South Dakota State University. All are at the cutting edge of forest monitoring in support of climate science.In collaboration with Matt Hansen and CONAFOR, Mexicos National Forestry Commission, weve produced a forest cover and water map of Mexico. The map required 15,000 hours of computation, but was completed in less than a day on Google Earth Engine, using 1,000 computers over more than 53,000 Landsat scenes (1984-2010). CONAFOR provided National Forest Inventory ground-sampled data to calibrate and validate the algorithm.A forest cover and water map of Mexico (southern portion, including the Yucatan peninsula), produced in collaboration with scientist Matthew Hansen moncler clairy jacket blue and CONAFOR.We hope that Google Earth Engine will be an important tool to help institutions around the world manage forests more wisely. As we fully develop the platform, we hope more scientists will use new Earth Engine API to integrate their applications onlinefor deforestation, disease mitigation, disaster response, water resource mapping and other beneficial uses. If youre interested in partnering with us, we want to hear from youvisit our website! We look forward to seeing whats possible when scientists, governments, NGOs, universities, and others gain access to data and computing resources to collaborate online to help protect the earths environment.Update on 12/6: Additional information on the Moore Foundation, Google Earth Engines Landsat archive, and the Congo Basin Water Map have been added to the post.Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google Earth Engine (Cross-posted on the Google.org and LatLong Blogs)Climate change is too often misunderstood to be simply an environmental issue, rather than a human issue. For our children and grandchildren, climate change is an issue of public health, economics, global security and social equity. This human side of climate change is explained in a new Google Earth tour narrated by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Within these stories, youll find data and tools to explore this topic in more depth, and meet some of the people who are actively working on managing the risks of climate variability and change. We encourage you to take the tour to learn more about these human issues and the inspiring work of groups like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) that are helping farmers cope with climate change. We hope this video will serve as a useful tool as educators moncler clairy jacket black help students around the world understand the complexity of this issue.This is the latest in our series of climate change tours that were releasing leading up to the global U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP16) talks in Cancun, Mexico this week.As part of the Google Earth for Educators Community, weve also created a special Climate Change Educators Resources page that teachers can use in their classrooms. Here, teachers can find the tools they need to create lesson plans about climate change, including all the individual Google Earth KML layers available for download. Teachers and students can overlay multiple data layers that help illustrate climate change, and discuss and analyze them as part of K-12 and higher education curriculum. Were also looking for lessons plans for any school grade that use this narrated tour or these Google Earth KML layers, so if youre a teacher or instructor, please submit your lesson plan for review now.Visit google.com/landing/cop16/climatetours.html or the Climate Change Educators Resources page to learn more about climate change today.Posted by Dr. Amy Luers, Google.org