“It’s a new frontier in global, high-resolution, near-real-time environmental monitoring,” Rebecca Moore, director of Google Earth, said at an online press launch on June 6. Called Dynamic World, it’s said to be the first global land cover data set available in near-real-time at high resolution.

Google and the World Resources Institute (WRI) this week announced the launch of a new mapping tool touted as providing an unprecedented level of detail about how land is being used around the world.

The tool is likely to be important for a variety of purposes, the developers say, such as monitoring the progress of ecosystem restoration goals, assessing the effectiveness of protected areas, creating sustainable food systems, and alerting land managers to unforeseen land changes like deforestation and fires.

Named Dynamic World, it merges cloud-based artificial intelligence with satellite imagery to give near-real-time global visualizations of nine types of land use and land cover.

The launch of the tool this week marks a big step forward in enabling organizations and governments to make better science-based, data-informed decisions about urgent planetary challenges, the developers say.

A new tool co-developed by Google Earth Engine and the World Resources Institute is being billed as the planet’s most up-to-date and high-resolution global land cover mapping data set, giving unprecedented levels of detail about how land is being used around the world.

Earth view from google earth