Type of tool: Remote sensing technology
Collect Earth is a free and open source application for land monitoring that facilitates access to multiple freely available repositories of satellite imagery (Google Earth, Bing Map, Landsat, MODIS and Sentinel). It covers the period from 1984 onwards. It allows users to assess land use and land use change information which is crucial for estimating greenhouse gas emissions and removals from the AFOLU sector for a wide variety of purposes including: Support multi-phase National Forest Inventories; Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry; Monitoring agricultural land and urban areas; Validating of existing maps; Collection of spatially explicit socio-economic data; Quantifying deforestation, reforestation, and desertification. The data gathered through Collect Earth is exportable to commonly used formats and can also be exported to Saiku, a tool that facilitates data analysis.