Speaker:
GIACOMO FALCHETTA, CMCC@Ca’ Foscari, RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE) and International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

Moderator:
ENRICA DE CIAN, CMCC@Ca’ Foscari, RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE) and Venice Ca’ Foscari University

Requirements:

•     ATTENTION: for a better interaction during the seminar, you had a better request a Google Earth Engine account as well before the course starts at: https://signup.earthengine.google.com/#!/
•     R 3.6+ and RStudio installed on your computer
•     Basic knowledge of the R programming language
•     An understanding of what spatial data and GIS are

Abstract:

Remote sensing techniques enable collecting large amounts of granular information over large areas (e.g. globally) and at different spatio-temporal resolution scales. Satellite data and other GIS products are increasingly available to everyone and for free, and they find applications in a growing number of research areas related to climate change, environmental science, economics, and human development. However, processing highly granular data to fit specific research needs comes at the cost of high computational requirements. Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a free-for-research online toolbox that uses Google cloud computing to quickly process large amounts of spatial data, including data from Google’s very large data catalogue. GEE thus allows to circumnavigate the local download and processing of raw data by moving these tasks on the cloud. In this crash course we show how to use GEE directly from the R programming language, and thus integrate GEE processing steps into conventional coding routines, including the widely used raster and sf R packages. We provide examples of data processing tasks and discuss potential applications.