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1. Introduction

Source: vignettes/Installation.Rmd
Installation.Rmd

This vignette shows how to install the required components and register a new user on the Google Earth Engine platform, in order to use its API within the land4health package to access and extract multiple variables relevant to Spatial Epidemiology.

1.1 What is Google Earth Engine?

Google Earth Engine is a cloud-based platform that helps access high-performance computing resources for processing and analyzing large geospatial datasets (Noel Golerick et al.,2017).

1.2 Objectives:

  • Be accessible to various professionals without being experts in handling supercomputers.
  • Reduce pre-post processing time of satellite images on a local, regional or global scale.
  • Implement application development without being a backend/frontend expert.
  • Boost the development of big data for remote sensing.

1.3 Components:

  • Data catalog: Curated collection of several petabytes of geospatial datasets widely used in remote sensing available to the general public.

  • High performance computing service: Google’s computational infrastructure to optimize parallel processing and distribution of geospatial data.

  • API and client libraries: Application programming interface for making requests to Earth Engine servers.

    • API
      • Client libraries
      • Code Editor
      • REST API
    • Client libraries:
      • JavaScript
      • Python
      • R (no official)

1.4 Quickly review of Data catalog

2. Installation and setup land4health

2.1 GMAIL register

To access all the benefits offered by the Earth Engine platform, you must have an active Google (Gmail) account. To register, go to 👉 https://code.earthengine.google.com/register.

Earth Engine offers two registration options:

  • Commercial user: For commercial product development, service monetization, and related purposes.

  • Non-commercial user: For research, education, and academic activities.

For our purposes, we will proceed by selecting the non-commercial user option.

You can install the development version of land4health from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("harmonize-tools/land4health")
── Welcome to land4health ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
A tool of Harmonize Project to calculate and extract Remote Sensing Metrics for Spatial Health Analysis.
Currently,`land4health` supports metrics in the following categories:
• Accesibility
• Climate
• Enviroment
• and more!
For a complete list of available metrics, use the `l4h_list_metrics()` function.

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Attaching core land4health packages:
→ rgee v1.1.7
→ sf v1.0.21
── Installing land4health Python dependencies ───────────────
ℹ Step 1/3: Checking Python environment
ℹ Step 2/3: Installing Python packages
✔ Python packages installed successfully
ℹ Step 3/3: Finalizing setup
✔ land4health setup completed.
ee_Initialize()
#> ── rgee 1.1.7 ─────────────────────────────────────── earthengine-api 0.1.370 ── 
#>  ✔ user: not_defined 
#>  ✔ Initializing Google Earth Engine: ✔ Initializing Google Earth Engine:  DONE!
#>  ✔ Earth Engine account: users/geografo2023 
#>  ✔ Python Path: C:/Users/mvcs_dgppvu_ambi/AppData/Local/R/cache/R/reticulate/uv/cache/archive-v0/At8gJm7EZeLgoj4R1d2hk/Scripts/python.exe 
#> ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
land4health::l4h_packages()
#> [1] "rgee"        "sf"          "land4health"