Collect Earth

Collect Earth is a free and open source application for land monitoring developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) with the support of Google Earth Outreach. Supported by Google cloud and desktop technologies, it facilitates access to multiple freely available repositories of satellite imagery. These include very high spatial resolution imagery (Google Earth, Bing Map) and the full catalogue of high resolution imagery from Landsat, MODIS and Sentinel through the Google Earth Engine cloud services covering from 1984 onwards. This combination allows for both the possibility to analyze current land cover/use as well as to track its changes

By customizing the inputs of Collect Earth, such as the data collection form, sampling design and plot size, users can easily configure Collect Earth to address specific monitoring purposes, such as landscape restoration, reporting for REDD+, national forest inventories, disaster assessments and humanitarian work, livestock and rangeland management, etc. with a multi-temporal and multi-scale approach.

While using the most advanced technologies, Collect Earth offers the possibility to undertake monitoring tasks in a fast and easy way that does not require users to be remote sensing experts. This increases the probabilities of adoption as a monitoring mechanism for many types of purposes and the ownership of the generated data. Collect Earth enables developing countries to use the same methodological approach used by developed countries to assess their Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) and Land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) processes and to report to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).