Mapping of NDVI in Ecuador During the Last 20 Years Using the Google Earth Engine Cloud Geospatial Tool

This study was carried out with data from satellite remote Sensing, which provides detailed information about the Earth’s surface. The advantage of remote Sensing is the information about vegetation cover, temperature, seasonal variation, and tropical deforestation, which can be provided to different environmental studies. Nowadays, the advances in cloud computing allow faster answers in the image processing data, and remote Sensing is not the exception in this development. Thus, applications such as Google Earth Engine (GEE) and free satellite data such as Sentinel-2 or the Landsat family let us perceive the surface better and establish some comparison over time. The proposed study uses a GEE App to view vegetation changes using Ecuador’s Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) over the last twenty years. The application works with Landsat 7 images showing a projection from 2000 to 2002, Landsat 8 with intervals between 2013 and 2015 and Sentinel 2 for 2022 to 2023. These sensors collect free and available data (without cloud and noise) from the GEE catalogue. Thus, using a colour scale and range of values, the user can experiment with the real changes at the time in terms of vegetation over the Ecuadorian territory. These GEE tools can help different levels of authorities to make faster and more right decisions about spatial planning on the environment. The online application is available at https://cesarivanalvarezmendoza.users.earthengine.app/view/ndvi.