Google Earth Engine: Apps, Snapshots & Source
As part of the many announcements that came out of the Geo for Good 2021 virtual conference was the announcement from Google that Google Earth Engine apps are getting an upgrade from being experimental. They are here to stay and they will allow some really great features to support scaling and adding logos and much more. If you haven’t read the blog post from Emily titled here “Earth Engine Apps are here to stay”
Keeping in line with the idea of community-based tools and applications I wanted to write something on Day 2 which took the public and collaborator repositories and users and did a deep dive into apps. For a lot of users like me learning from apps is a way to understand user interactions, learn about behavior and ease of use and understand how to optimize and package code into something that just runs. Over the span of this year, one of the apps I had fun writing was the United States Drought Monitor app, special thanks to Justin for that one. This uses the community dataset I maintain from the United States Drought Monitor and allows you to plot long time trends in the Drought category over US counties, you can find it here
I was also aware that people wanted to play with each other's public apps and not just visualize but also go in and learn from the source code. Drawing inspirations from Philipp Gärtner’s work on Awesome Earth Engine apps. With the Github summit in the recent past and the power of GitHub actions and going into Day 2 and Day 3 of the Geo for Good summit I thought it was only apt to write another blog focusing on this. With that in mind, I created ee-appshot
The idea was to allow for a programmatic fetch of user apps from a subset of users who were part of my initial blog on Git Stories in case you want to read it find it here on Earth Engine code commits and history. So with the same list in mind, this whole Github Project uses a single Github action to fetch the app URLs and the code editor source course for these apps and updates it currently at a weekly frequency. You can find the project here at about 2400 apps and source code currently https://github.com/samapriya/ee-appshot. The outputs are a persistent JSON object with app URL and a persistent zipped source code to the apps listed.
Getting to the Source
What separates this is the capability for you to get to the JS representation of all apps listed in a neat little zip file for use.
The subfolders are arranged by GEE usernames and are updated at the same frequency of one week.
And there you have it, I think it is powerful what we can do as we learn from the community, and this repository and Github project is a step in the same direction. Expect some minor changes but for now, this is mostly a self-sustained app where I can add to the list of users to be parsed for apps. As always I hope you enjoy the work and adapt it to your own needs, add your own user list and generate your own lists. Happy Day 3 of GeoforGood2021 and I hope you enjoy the read and the project.
