A team from the United States of America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is at FAO headquarters this week to learn more about FAO’s innovative Collect Earth land monitoring software. The five-day training will focus on the use and customization potential of Collect Earth, a free and open source software which uses freely available satellite images, such as Landsat and Sentinel 2, and builds on Google Earth and Google Earth Engine technologies. Collect Earth benefits from the FAO/Google partnership, officially signed at the COP21 in Paris in December 2015. FAO has already trained 700+ people around the world to use Collect Earth, which is part of its free Open Foris suite of tools that can guide countries through the entire life cycle of a forest inventory or any other land use assessment. “Collect Earth is a game changer - we will be able, together with all other actors, to monitor the world’s forests much more efficiently,” said René Castro Salazar, FAO Assistant Director-General, Forestry. The NASA team works for SERVIR, a joint venture between NASA and USAID helps developing countries use information provided by Earth observing satellites and geospatial technologies to manage climate risks and land use. [more]