This post was written by SERVIR-Mekong

Landscapes on Earth are changing at unprecedented rates. In the Lower Mekong region, officials have struggled to manage landscape changes partly because they lack sufficient access to geospatial technology and data to monitor land cover changes and guide land use decisions.

Through SERVIR-Mekong, the Asian Disaster Preparedness Council (ADPC) and Google Earth Engine (GEE) are changing this reality and bringing the power of cloud computing to practitioners—dramatically improving their geospatial capabilities via a series of GEE train-the-trainer workshops. Trainings across the region deliver skills that will directly benefit environmental management and sustainable development planning.

GEE provides access to millions of gigabytes of Earth observation satellite imagery and a powerful cloud-based tool that can streamline land cover monitoring. Work that used to take months can now be done in seconds. Financial resources that would have been spent on large servers and high-computing processors can instead be reallocated for other strategic purposes.

Several training courses on the use of Google Earth Engine have been completed, with over 130 practitioners trained across the region and more trainings on the way. Just like SERVIR’s motto, ‘connecting space to village,’ Google Earth Engine brings remote sensing capability to anyone with an internet connection and helps to build capacities to answer environment and development questions.

SERVIR-Mekong is leveraging the power of GEE to develop the Regional Land Cover Monitoring System, whose purpose is to produce high-quality regional land cover maps  and identify land cover changes in the Lower Mekong region.

This figure shows where the research in today's post contributes to the Feed the Future Results Framework