Satellite

World Wide Web

Product (mathematics)

Engineering

Ecology

Aerospace engineering

Biology

Statistics

Data collection

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index

Operating system

The Internet

Civil engineering

Land cover

Computer science

Cloud computing

Software as a service

Mechanical engineering

Software

Climate change

Database

Mathematics

Geography

Environmental resource management

Environmental science

Data science

Geometry

Remote sensing

Land use

Programming language

Cover (algebra)

Earth observation

Plot (graphics)

Software development

Environmental Modelling & Software

Land cover monitoring efforts are important for resource planning and ecosystem services in many countries. Collect Earth Online (CEO) is a new, free open source and user-friendly software tool for land monitoring. It is the product of a collaborative effort between NASA, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), US Forest Service and Google. This paper provides a full overview of CEO's structure and functionality. Based on the cloud, CEO's structure supports simultaneous data entry by multiple users. No desktop installation is required and only an internet connection is required setting minimal requirements for using the software. Google Earth Engine widgets can be created for assisted plot interpretation such as image collection, time series graphs featuring indices such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and related statistics. We also provide a case study and related findings from a CEO workshop held in Myanmar.

Collect Earth: An online tool for systematic reference data collection in land cover and use applications