1. Introducing GEE and Geemap

1.1. Introduction

Google Earth Engine is a popular cloud-computing platform used by the geospatial community. It has a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets, allowing users to visualize, manipulate, edit and create spatial data in an easy and fast way. Built upon the Earth Engine Python API and open-source mapping libraries, geemap makes it much easier to analyze and visualize Earth Engine datasets in a Jupyter environment. Since its initial release in April 2020, geemap has become the most popular Python library for Earth Engine data analysis and visualization.

In this chapter, we will cover the basics of Geospatial Data Science, Google Earth Engine, and geemap. Then, we will walk through the steps to set up a conda environment and in