Merging dynamic point and environmental data using customized layers in Earth Engine
Ben Carlson,
PhD Candidate, Yale University
Lightening talks from scientists & Googlers hosted at Google's booth @ the 2022 American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference. Ben joined virtually!
Abstract by speaker:
Matching point records to spatiotemporally coincident environmental data is an important step in many scientific analyses, included in my field of movement ecology. Although there are many approaches and platforms for the environmental annotation of point records, Earth Engine provides an important capacity not available in any other system—the ability to annotate against customized, on-the-fly layers that do not exist as previously saved assets. Although this is a simple operation in Earth Engine, it represents an important shift in thinking about how we interact with environmental data and significantly expands the possible environmental data available to analyses. In this presentation, I describe how to annotate against computed objects, why this capacity is so important to any field with massive time-series point datasets (including movement ecology), and introduce a research tool I have developed (mosey_env) that enables annotation of these large point datasets using Earth Engine.