Progress and Trends in the Application of Google Earth and Google Earth Engine

Qiang Zhao,Xuecao Li,Peng Gong,Yongguang Zhang,Le Yu,Dailiang Peng

doi:10.3390/rs13183778

Abstract

Earth system science has changed rapidly due to global environmental changes and the advent of Earth observation technology. Therefore, new tools are required to monitor, measure, analyze, evaluate, and model Earth observation data. Google Earth (GE) was officially launched by Google in 2005 as a ”geobrowser”, and Google Earth Engine (GEE) was released in 2010 as a cloud computing platform with substantial computational capabilities. The use of these two tools or platforms in various applications, particularly as used by the remote sensing community, has developed rapidly. In this paper, we reviewed the applications and trends in the use of GE and GEE by analyzing peer-reviewed articles, dating up to January 2021, in the Web of Science (WoS) core collection using scientometric analysis (i.e., by using CiteSpace) and meta-analysis. We found the following: (1) the number of articles describing the use of GE or GEE increased substantially from two in 2006 to 530 in 2020. The number of GEE articles increased much faster than those concerned with the use of GE. (2) Both GE and GEE were extensively used by the remote sensing community as multidisciplinary tools. GE articles covered a broader range of research areas (e.g., biology, education, disease and health, economic, and information science) and appeared in a broader range of journals than those concerned with the use of GEE. (3) GE and GEE shared similar keywords (e.g., “land cover”, “water”, “model”, “vegetation”, and “forest”), which indicates that their application is of great importance in certain research areas. The main difference was that articles describing the use of GE emphasized its use as a visual display platform, while those concerned with GEE placed more emphasis on big data and time-series analysis. (4) Most applications of GE and GEE were undertaken in countries, such as the United States, China, and the United Kingdom. (5) GEE is an important tool for analysis, whereas GE is used as an auxiliary tool for visualization. Finally, in this paper, the merits and limitations of GE and GEE, and recommendations for further improvements, are summarized from an Earth system science perspective.

Highlights

Global environmental change is one of the most critical challenges facing attempts to achieve sustainable development
We comprehensively summarized the ways in which Google Earth (GE) and Google Earth Engine (GEE) were applied, and the trends in these applications, as well as the differences and similarities in the way that the two tools were used
Published papers on GE have appeared in a wider range of journals covering a wider range of research areas than GEE papers (Section 3.1)

Summary

Introduction

Global environmental change is one of the most critical challenges facing attempts to achieve sustainable development. Administration) in the 1990s [1]. This interdisciplinary science emerged to address global. 2021, 13, 3778 environmental change in a way that was systematic and integrated. Identified three challenges facing traditional geographic information science (GIS): (1) the the preprocessing and mining of geographic big data; and (3) spatial-temporal techniques for research into geographic processes. There is an urgent need to make significant technological advances to solve global environmental problems [2]. The use of Google Earth (GE) and Google Earth Engine (GEE) to analyze environmental problems at global scales is becoming common

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Discussion

Conclusion