Introduction to Forest Change Analysis in Earth Engine

global Indonesia Paraguay Legend
Figure 1. Forest change estimated by Hansen et al. (2013). Global Change, 2000 - 2012 (left); Change in Riau, Indonesia, 2000 - 2012 (center); Change in Paraguay, 2000 - 2012 (right)

Welcome to the Google Earth Engine tutorial for using Hansen et al. (2013) global forest cover and change data and Forest Monitoring for Action (FORMA, Hammer et al. 2009) data from Global Forest Watch. This tutorial provides examples of how to use Earth Engine to visualize these data, how to compute forest change over time and other statistics within a region of interest and how to download both the data and results of analyses.

License and Attribution

CC 4.0

The data described in this tutorial are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Please use the recommended citation on the relevant dataset description page.

Prerequisites

The tutorial assumes no programming background, although it does assume a willingness to learn some programming. Before proceeding, please make sure to:

Once you're familiar with JavaScript, the Earth Engine API and Code Editor, get started on the tutorial!