Future Of Google Earth

GSA Special Paper 492 consists of 35 papers that collectively synthesize the development and current uses of Google Earth and associated visualization media in geoscience education and research. Chapters focus on Google Earth and related tools, such as SketchUp, Google Fusion Tables, GigaPan, and LiDAR. Many of these papers include digital media that illustrate and highlight important themes of the texts. This volume is intended to document the state of the art for geoscience applications of geobrowsers, such as Google Earth, along with providing provocative examples of where this technology is headed in the future.

In a rapidly changing world, there is an ever-increasing need to monitor the Earth’s resources and manage it sustainably for future generations. Earth observation from satellites is critical to provide information required for informed and timely decision making in this regard. Satellite-based earth observation has advanced rapidly over the last 50 years, and there is a plethora of satellite sensors imaging the Earth at finer spatial and spectral resolutions as well as high temporal resolutions. The amount of data available for any single location on the Earth is now at the petabyte-scale. An ever-increasing capacity and computing power is needed to handle such large datasets. The Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a cloud-based computing platform that was established by Google to support such data processing. This facility allows for the storage, processing and analysis of spatial data using centralized high-power computing resources, allowing scientists, researchers, hobbyists and anyone else interested in such fields to mine this data and understand the changes occurring on the Earth’s surface. This book presents research that applies the Google Earth Engine in mining, storing, retrieving and processing spatial data for a variety of applications that include vegetation monitoring, cropland mapping, ecosystem assessment, and gross primary productivity, among others. Datasets used range from coarse spatial resolution data, such as MODIS, to medium resolution datasets (Worldview -2), and the studies cover the entire globe at varying spatial and temporal scales.

In this book, Dr Cole Hendrigan examines the options for sustainable transport and land-use planning based on building heights, mixes of land-use, transportation mode capacity and others to build the next generation of parks, housing, commercial and retail spaces along high-capacity rail corridors. Following the paradigm of ‘Transit Oriented Development’, Dr Hendrigan provides unique knowledge and insights on how to best make the transition towards more sustainable and livable cities, offering a practical method to better integrate transport and urban development to this end.

Interdisciplinary Teaching about the Earth and Environment for a Sustainable Future presents the outcomes of the InTeGrate project, a community effort funded by the National Science Foundation to improve Earth literacy and build a workforce prepared to tackle environmental and resource issues. The InTeGrate community is built around the shared goal of supporting interdisciplinary learning about Earth across the undergraduate curriculum, focusing on the grand challenges facing society and the important role that the geosciences play in addressing these grand challenges. The chapters in this book explicitly illustrate the intimate relationship between geoscience and sustainability that is often opaque to students. The authors of these chapters are faculty members, administrators, program directors, and researchers from institutions across the country who have collectively envisioned, implemented, and evaluated effective change in their classrooms, programs, institutions, and beyond. This book provides guidance to anyone interested in implementing change—on scales ranging from a single course to an entire program—by infusing sustainability across the curriculum, broadening access to Earth and environmental sciences, and assessing the impacts of those changes.

The geosciences are one of the fields leading the way in advancing semantic technologies. This book continues the dialogue and feedback between the geoscience and semantic web communities. Increasing data volumes within the geosciences makes it no longer practical to copy data and perform local analysis. Hypotheses are now being tested through online tools that combine and mine pools of data. This evolution in the way research is conducted is commonly referred to as e-Science. As e-Science has flourished, the barriers to free and open access to data have been lowered and the need for semantics has been heighted. As the volume, complexity, and heterogeneity of data resources grow, geoscientists are creating new capabilities that rely on semantic approaches. Geoscience researchers are actively working toward a research environment of software tools and interfaces to data archives and services with the goals of full-scale semantic integration beginning to take shape. The members of this emerging semantic e-Science community are increasingly in need of semantic-based methodologies, tools and infrastructure. A feedback system between the geo- and computational sciences is forming. Advances in knowledge modeling, logic-based hypothesis checking, semantic data integration, and knowledge discovery are leading to advances in scientific domains, which in turn are validating semantic approaches and pointing to new research directions. We present mature semantic applications within the geosciences and stimulate discussion on emerging challenges and new research directions.

"This reference expands the field of database technologies through four-volumes of in-depth, advanced research articles from nearly 300 of the world's leading professionals"--Provided by publisher.