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Introduction to Forest Change Analysis in Earth Engine

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

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:

Signup for Earth Engine. Once you have been accepted, you will receive an email with additional information.
Get familiar with the Earth Engine Code Editor, the IDE for writing Earth Engine JavaScript code in a web browser. Learn more about the Code Editor here.
If you are unfamiliar with JavaScript, check out the JavaScript for Earth Engine tutorial.
If you are unfamiliar with the Earth Engine API, check out the Introduction to the Earth Engine API tutorial.

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