Google Earth Engine in QGIS

Google Earth Engine is a very powerful tool providing access to a huge number of earth observation datasets. Rather than having to heavy processing on your own machine, Earth Engine takes care of that for you and you can work quickly and efficiently. Now, fortunately for us, a plugin has been developed (thanks Gennadii Donchyts and the GEE community!) that means we can get the power of Google Earth Engine direct to our QGIS desktop installation. You can check out the user guide for any updates as at the time of writing the plugin was in Alpha.

In this series of videos we'll look at installing the plugin, checking out some datasets and converting code from Javascript to Python. In the final part we'll use QGIS Atlas to generate images that can then be made into a geogif. If you're new to QGIS and think this might be a bit beyond you why not take our crash course in GIS and QGIS. It's quick and will get you much more comfortable and confident with the interface.

Let's get started with the first video tutorial and install Google Earth Engine plugin!

With the plugin installed and working (get in touch if you're on a Mac and having trouble) now we can convert some Javascript code to Python for use in QGIS. A big thanks to Qiusheng Wu for his brilliant Github repo.

With the code working and our images showing in QGIS the next stage is to set up QGIS atlas to control which layers are showing when. We'll use map themes for this.

If you'd like to dig deeper into geogiffery then check out these posts by @undertheraedar and @tjukanov.

Well, congratulations. You've made it to the end of the series! If you've used these videos to make your own map I'd love to see what you've created. You can find me on Twitter so @ your maps to me with the hashtag #GEEBurd. If you'd like to show your support and make more GIS tutorials possible you can through paypal or simply share this post :-) Subscribe to the YouTube channel for more tutorials and geo-jiggery-pokery.

Thanks for reading and Happy Mapping!