Collect Earth Online (CEO)

Collect Earth Online is a custom built, open-source, satellite image viewing and interpretation system developed by SERVIR, FAO, and other partners as a tool for use in projects that require land cover and/or land use data. Collect Earth Online promotes consistency in locating, interpreting, and labeling reference data plots for use in classifying and monitoring land cover / land use change. The full functionality of Collect Earth Online, including collaborative compilation of reference point databases, is implemented online so there is no need for desktop installation. The Collect Earth Online codebase is shared through the Open Foris Initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Rationale

Collect Earth Online provides an intuitive, web-based data collection interface that enables multiple users to contribute to labeling the landscape for monitoring and classification purposes. To start, users create projects that bring together multiple sources of imagery of the earth’s surface. Next, they can pair imagery with a customizable labeling questionnaire, which allows other users to contribute data. Crowdsourcing data (or leveraging ‘community science’), enables users to collect large amounts of data quickly to answer important questions such as “Is this land forested?” or “Do you see evidence of a mine in this location?”. To date, 4,500+ users have collaboratively assigned labels to over 9 million sample plots in Collect Earth Online. Finally, Collect Earth Online leverages four decades of satellite data, and connects users to multiple sources of imagery of the earth’s surface in one place.