Collect Earth Online gateway

Degradation events, including deforestation, forest degradation, and illegal mining, are short term events that occur at relatively small spatial scales that require consistent and timely information to accurately detect. This same information is required to assess the effectiveness of sustainable management and restoration activities. Characterizing these events can be facilitated by connecting mapping applications with a platform to view high resolution remote sensing images and attribute land cover and land use (LULC) information at plot locations.

Collect Earth Online (CEO) is an open source satellite image viewing and interpretation platform developed for projects investigating LULC classification and change. Importantly, CEO has a user interface allowing many people to collaboratively contribute to visual LULC classification and change detection. However, CEO was originally built as a stand alone application that was not easily integrated into other web applications.

We present the CEO gateway, which facilitates communication between CEO and other web-based analysis tools to improve information availability and broaden the use case for CEO. We will outline CEO gateway's system architecture, which is built on Django framework for Python and GEE, along with the verification system that communicates with CEO. We present two applications of the CEO gateway. The first is integration with SEPAL, a cloud based system that allows users to process satellite data and produce sophisticated geospatial analyses. SEPAL's main users are government agencies responsible for measuring, reporting and verification of greenhouse gas inventories. To verify inventory accuracy, they use SEPAL and CEO gateway to determine the uncertainty of LULC area estimates--merging SEPAL's geospatial analysis capabilities with visual verification using satellite imagery. The second is a system built for enforcement officials to detect gold mining deforestation. The system alerts users when mining activities are detected by the automated mapping process based on Sentinel-1 radar and high resolution imagery. Users are able to verify the event online via the CEO gateway prior to making an enforcement decision. These are just two examples of applications that can benefit from the ability to link web mapping applications with Collect Earth Online functionality.