Google released Thursday a new dataset that depicts features on the Earth’s surface in near real-time. Dynamic World is a program that utilizes deep learning and satellite photos to create a high-resolution land cover map that reveals whether areas of land have features such as trees, crops, or water.
Land cover maps often take a long time to create, and there are significant gaps between the time photographs are captured and the data is published. They also frequently lack a precise breakdown of what’s on the ground in a given area — for example, a city would be classed as “built-up” (a category for human-altered landscapes) even if there are large portions with parks.
