Jane Edwards
Lesta Brady, director of federal civilian sales at Google’s cloud business, said the use of Google Cloud and Google Earth Engine, a platform meant for Earth science data and analysis, helped the U.S. Forest Service at the Department of Agriculture analyze a decade’s worth of land-cover changes within an hour.
The Forest Service developed new models and mapped those changes in land cover as part of its Landscape Change Monitoring System project, Brady wrote in a blog post published Wednesday.
She noted that the use of such tools has helped USFS examine the effects of forest fires, climate change, insects and disease, glean new insights and develop strategies to support sustainable management of natural resources.
“Researchers elsewhere also benefited when the Forest Service created new toolkits, and posted them to GitHub for public use,” she wrote.
An example of that is a repository of Google Earth Engine Python code modules, dubbed geeViz, that can be used to process, analyze and visualize data.
Brady also discussed the agency’s adoption of Google Cloud’s analysis and processing tools in projects, such as California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan, Fuelcast and the Scenario Investment Planning Platform.
