The Earth Library

A global reference library for land cover spectra, and tools for working with it.

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Documentation: earth-chris.github.io/earthlib

Source code: earth-chris/earthlib

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Introduction

earthlib is a spectral library and a set of software tools for satellite-base land cover mapping.

The library contains several thousand unique spectral endmembers representing green vegetation, soil, non-photosynthetic vegetation, urban materials, and burned materials. The reflectance data cover the visible to the shortwave infrared wavelengths (400-2450 nm) at 10 nm band widths.

The software tools (1) resample these data to match the wavelenths of popular satellite and airborne earth observing sensors and (2) run spectral mixture analysis in Google Earth Engine via the earthengine python package.

The goal is to quantify spatial and temporal patterns of change in global vegetation cover, as well as patterns of soil cover, burned area, non-photosynthetic vegetation, and impervious surfaces. With earthlib, you can do this using most public satellite data sources.

Installation

This library can be installed via pip.

pip install earthlib

You can also clone the source repository and install it locally.

git clone https://github.com/earth-chris/earthlib.git
cd earthlib
pip install -e .

conda

I recommend working with earthlib in conda (download from here). The environment.yml file in this repository contains a series of packages that are either required (earthengine-api) or just convenient (jupyter, folium) to have.

git clone https://github.com/earth-chris/earthlib.git
cd earthlib
conda env update

Once the environment has been created, you can activate it with conda activate earthlib.

Contact

This work is supported by the Stanford Center for Conservation Biology and the Natural Capital Project.