EarthEngine

This post isn't really about parks, land use, property, or any particular story or issue. Rather, it's just a short entry about one of my favorite sites/internet toys: EarthEngine. This site is a Google production, with government and academic collaborators (I believe), that has taken lots of satellite imagery (and other data as well that you can explore) from the almost forty year history of the global imaging program and stitched them together (with other data fusion techniques to smooth, blend, and remove errors, clouds, and missing data) to create time lapse videos of change on the Earth's surface. It might not show the exact state of the land at any given time, but it clearly shows general trends, and in some cases (it provides some highlights/lowlights) the differences can be striking, alarming, amazing, and/or depressing.

While most people use it out of curiosity, it does have significant research and policy-informing uses as well. With it, it is possible to see rapid deforestation, the progression of coal mining, rapid urbanization, and changes in river flow. It does have some pre-loaded time lapse examples that are particularly striking, but after viewing them it's almost addictive to go looking for more areas of personal interest. I haven't personally used any of the other data features it has, but I am certainly intrigued and thought it would be worth mentioning here for anyone else interested in the things I write about.