Greetings! Is using ‘JRC Global Surface Water Mapping Layers’ and processing it through Google earth engine allowed and and accepted? Thanks.
Hi @rubai_du! Good question.
Any tools used must be publicly available and free to use (see the problem description for details). As of now, Google Earth Engine does not clearly comply with these rules, so we would not recommend using it in your submission. If that policy changes, we’ll notify folks by posting on the Announcements page of the competition.
Do you have a link to the access point you are planning to use for the ‘JRC Global Surface Water Mapping Layers’ dataset? Who is the data provided by? If the dataset meets the supplementary data requirement of being publicly and freely available, you may be still be able to use it even if you aren’t able to process it with Google Earth Engine.
For some other good options for accessing competition data, I recommend checking out the data resources blog post. Good luck and don’t hesitate to reach out with any other questions!
The ‘JRC Global Surface Water Mapping Layers’ dataset was developed by European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in the framework of the Copernicus Programme and these data were generated using 4,716,475 scenes from Landsat 5, 7, and 8. All of the datasets that comprise the Global Surface Water 1984-2021 are being made freely available using the following delivery mechanisms: Global Surface Water Explorer, Data Download, Google Earth Engine and Web Map Services.
I planned to use the aforementioned dataset as my primary data source(as its free and open to use) and wanted to analyze and process it by Google earth engine Javascript API.
Thank you.
@rubai_du Thanks for the additional detail!
It sounds like the “JRC Global Surface Water Mapping Layers” is a valid source, but you’ll still need to make sure that any access points and tools are also publicly available and free to use. If you want to send the link to the specific location you’re planning to download it from, I’d be happy to confirm that it meets the requirements.
Unfortunately, we don’t recommend using Google Earth Engine (this is mentioned in the problem description here).
I was actually caught up in the same puzzle earlier on, especially since I have always known Google Earth Engine to be free, until I got to read GEE’s terms of use and now it makes sense. It isn’t considered to meet the criteria for free use in certain contexts due to its specific terms of service and licensing agreements. While Google Earth Engine does offer free access to some basic services and datasets, there are limitations on the extent of free usage, and additional charges may apply for certain types of usage, especially for heavy or commercial use.
But hey, it’s just a GIS tool, you can pretty use python, QGIS etc to perform the same tasks. Let’s keep going!
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