geemap: A Python package for interactive mapping with Google Earth Engine
Qiusheng Wu · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2020
geemap is a Python package for interactive mapping with Google Earth Engine (GEE), which is a cloud computing platform with a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets (e.g., Landsat, Sentinel, MODIS, NAIP) (Gorelick et al., 2017).During the past few years, GEE has become very popular in the geospatial community and it has empowered numerous environmental applications at local, regional, and global scales.Some of the notable environmental applications include mapping global forest change (Hansen et al., 2013), global urban change (Liu et al., 2020), global surface water change (Pekel, Cottam, Gorelick, & Belward, 2016), wetland inundation dynamics (Wu et al., 2019), vegetation phenology (Li et al., 2019), and time series analysis (Kennedy et al., 2018).GEE provides both JavaScript and Python APIs for making computational requests to the Earth Engine servers.Compared with the comprehensive documentation and interactive IDE (i.e., GEE JavaScript Code Editor) of the GEE JavaScript API, the GEE Python API lacks good documentation and lacks functionality for visualizing results interactively.The geemap Python package is created to fill this gap.It is built upon ipyleaflet and ipywidgets, enabling GEE users to analyze and visualize Earth Engine datasets interactively with Jupyter notebooks.