Collect Earth: Land Use and Land Cover Assessment through Augmented Visual Interpretation

Collect Earth is a free and open source software for land monitoring developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The software is part of the set of tools called Open Foris, and was developed with Google Earth, Bing Maps and Google Earth Engine.

Collect Earth is designed so that users can analyze high and very high resolution satellite imagery for different purposes, including:

• Support multi-phase National Forest Inventories
• Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) assessments
• Monitoring agricultural land and urban areas
• Validation of existing maps
• Collection of spatially explicit socio-economic data
• Quantifying deforestation, reforestation and desertification

Watch this introductory video on Collect Earth:

Credits: Open Foris

Collect Earth uses Google and Bing archives, offering free access to an unparalleled amount of information on current and past land dynamics for any location in the world. The software is designed to be user friendly and with a smooth learning curve in order to have accurate and cost-effective assessments.

Collect Earth is highly customizable for specific data collection needs and methodologies and the data gathered is exportable to commonly used formats for data analysis.

Source: Collect Earth