Berkeley Earth Maps Powered by Google Maps Engine now available in the Google Maps Gallery

Posted by Dr. Robert Rohde, Berkeley Earth

Google Maps is a familiar and versatile tool for exploring the world, but adding new data on top of Google Maps has traditionally required expending effort for both data management and website scripting. Google recently expanded Google Maps Engine and debuted an updated Google Maps Gallery. These tools aim to make it easier for users and organizations to integrate their geographic data with Google Maps and share it with the world. At Berkeley Earth we had an early opportunity to work with these new tools.

The use of Google Maps Engine eliminates the need for users to run their own map-serving Web servers. Maps Engine also handles mundane mapping tasks, such as automatically converting georeferenced image files into beautiful map layers that can be viewed in Google Maps, no programming required.

Annual average land-surface temperature during the period 1951-1980 as estimated by Berkeley Earth.

Similarly, one can take tables of location data and map them onto a Google Map using geographic markers and popup message boxes that make it easy to explore georeferenced information.

Map of the more than 40,000 temperature stations used by the Berkeley Earth analysis. On the left is part of the original table of data. On the right is its representation in Google Maps Engine.

When mapping locations, the new Maps Engine tools allows users to upload their own geographic markers or chose from Google’s many selections; the geographic marker icons used in the temperature station map above were uploaded by us. Alternatively, we could have used one of the stock icons provided by Maps Engine. In addition, users can customize the content and appearance of the popup message boxes by using HTML. If the georeferenced data can be linked the web addresses of already existing online content, one can also incorporate images or outgoing links within the message boxes, helping the user find more information about the content presented in the map.

The ease of putting image layers into the new Maps Engine has allowed Berkeley Earth to create and share many scalable maps of climate and weather information that are fun to explore. Incorporating these maps in our website and posting them on the Google Maps Gallery provides the public with a new tool to help locate local weather stations, learn about local climate, and download various kinds of weather and climate data.

Now, anyone can easily learn about both the weather in their city and the climate of the entire globe from a single, simple interface. Google Maps Engine and the new Maps Gallery has allowed us to bring the story of climate to a broad audience in a way that can be easily understood.

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Map of Life A preview of how to evaluate species conservation with Google Earth Engine

Posted by Walter Jetz, Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, and Dave Thau, Developer Advocate, Google Earth Engine, with support from Robert Guralnick, Dept. of Natural History, University of Florida

Nature reserves have a vital role for protecting biodiversity and its many functions. However, there is often insufficient information available to determine where to most effectively invest conservation efforts to prevent future extinctions, or which species may be left out of conservation actions entirely.

To help address these issues, Map of Life, in collaboration with Google Earth Engine, has now pre-released a new service to pinpoint at-risk species and where in the world that they occur. At the fingertips of regional naturalists, conservation groups, resource managers and global threat assessors, the tool has the potential to help identify and close key information gaps and highlight species of greatest concern.

Take the Tamaulipas Pygmy Owl, one of the smallest owls in the world that is restricted to highland forests in Mexico. The consensus range map for the species indicates a broad distribution of over 50,000 km²:

Left: Tamaulipas Pygmy Owl (Glaucidium sanchezi, photo credit: Adam Kent). Right: Map of Life consensus range map showing the potentially habitable range of this species.

But accounting for available habitat in the area using remotely sensed information presents a different picture: less than 10% of this range are forested and at the suitable elevation.

Users can change the habitat association settings and explore on-the-fly how this affects the distribution and map quality. This refined range map now allows a much improved evaluation of the owl’s potential protection. Furthermore, the sensitivity of conservation assessments to various assumptions can be directly explored in this tool.

The owl’s potential protection is likely to occur in only around 1,000 km² that are under formal protection, representing seven reserves of which only two have greater than 100 km² area. This is much less than would be desirable for a species with this small a global range.

Another species example, the Hildegard’s Tomb Bat, is similarly concerning: less than 6,000 km² of suitable range remains for this forest specialist in East Africa, with less than half currently under protection.

A demonstration of this tool for 15 example species was pre-released at the decadal World Parks Congress in Sydney Australia last November to the global community of conservation scientists and practitioners. In the coming months this interactive evaluation will be expanded to thousands more species, providing a valuable resource to aid in global conservation efforts. For more information and updates, follow Map of Life.

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See through the clouds with Earth Engine and Sentinel 1 Data

Posted by Luc Vincent, Engineering Director, Geo Imagery

This year the Google Earth Engine team attended the European Geosciences Union General Assembly meeting in Vienna, Austria to engage with a number of European geoscientific partners. This was just the first of a series of European summits the team has attended over the past few months, including, most recently, the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society meeting held last week in Milan, Italy.

Noel Gorelick presenting Google Earth Engine at EGU 2015.

We are very excited to be collaborating with many European scientists from esteemed institutions such as the European Commission Joint Research Centre, Wageningen University, and University of Pavia. These researchers are utilizing the Earth Engine geospatial analysis platform to address issues of global importance in areas such as food security, deforestation detection, urban settlement detection, and freshwater availability.

Thanks to the enlightened free and open data policy of the European Commission and European Space Agency, we are pleased to announce the availability of Copernicus Sentinel-1 data through Earth Engine for visualization and analysis. Sentinel-1, a radar imaging satellite with the ability to see through clouds, is the first of at least 6 Copernicus satellites going up in the next 6 years.

Sentinel-1 data visualized using Earth Engine, showing Vienna (left) and Milan (right).

Wind farms seen off the Eastern coast of England.

This radar data offers a powerful complement to other optical and thermal data from satellites like Landsat, that are already available in the Earth Engine public data catalog. If you are a geoscientist interested in accessing and analyzing the newly available EC/ESA Sentinel-1 data, or anything else in our multi-petabyte data catalog, please sign up for Google Earth Engine.

We look forward to further engagements with the European research community and are excited to see what the world will do with the data from the European Unions Copernicus program satellites.

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Google Earth v7 0 0 7386 apk

• Google Earth v7.0.0.7386
• Size : 8.6 MB
• Requires Android: 2.2 and up
• Play Store Link - Visit
• Developer - Visit

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Description
Fly around the planet with a swipe of your finger with Google Earth for Android. Explore distant lands or reacquaint yourself with your childhood home. Search by voice for citiez, placez, and businessez. Browse layerz including roadz, borderz, placez, photos and more. Vizit the Earth Gallery to find exciting maps such as real-time earthquakes, planez in flight, hiking trails, city tours, and more.

Use the new “tour guide” to easily discover exciting new places to explore. With a quick swipe on the tab at the bottom of the screen, you can bring up a selection of virtual tourz from around the globe.

With new 3D imagery, you can now fly through complete 3D recreations of select cities, including San Francisco, Boston, Rome, and others. With every building modeled in 3D, you truly get a sense of flying above the city. 3D imagery is available on select devices, including most tablets.

You can easily navigate with your fingers, using:
* A one finger swipe to move the globe
* A two-finger pinch and rotate to zoom in and out and rotate your viewpoint
* Two-fingers swiped together to tilt your view
* A one-finger double-tap to zoom in
* A two-finger double-tap to zoom out

Change Log
- 7.1.2
- View your geocoded Google+ photos in Google Earth

Images

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