Google Earth Engine Workshop

Stellenbosch, South Africa

25 & 26 June 2019

Google Earth Engine Basics

Most people are familiar with Google Earth. Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a parallel development that started around 2010. It is a cloud computing platform for processing satellite imagery and other geospatial data. The service combines a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and useful geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis, which is a first of its kind. At this stage it's free for academic and other non-commercial use with commercial licences available.

I have been wanting to learn Earth Engine for a while and luckily a GEE workshop was held within our department. About 50 people, mostly newcomers to GEE, attended the two-day workshop in Stellenbosch on 25 & 26 June 2019. Topics covered included working in the Code Editor, building classifiers, widgets & apps, time series & change detection, introduction to Python in Colab Notebooks and using Tensorflow. In addition to lectures a buildathon was also held in the afternoons where geospatial problems were solved by attendees divided into groups. You can view some of the buildathon apps, other resources and the full agenda on the workshop website.

GEE Code Editor
Some workshop attendees
Directions to the workshop