Earth Index

Earth Index is a browser-based application from the US non-profit Earth Genome for finding environmental features and harms in satellite imagery. Locating things such as illegal mines, logging roads or waste sites by scanning imagery is slow and normally needs machine-learning expertise; Earth Index replaces that with labelling examples on a map.

Earth Genome builds yearly cloud-free composites from all bands of Sentinel-2 imagery and uses Earth observation foundation models to encode the planet, divided into more than 3.2 billion overlapping tiles of about 10 hectares, into a searchable database of embeddings. A user draws an area of interest (up to 900,000 sq km), chooses 2024 or 2025 imagery and marks positive and negative example tiles. Quick Search returns the most similar tiles almost instantly by nearest-neighbour search; Deep Search trains a classifier on the labelled embeddings and runs it over every tile in the area, and can return more than 100,000 results. Users can upload GeoJSON reference layers or build one from OpenStreetMap by describing it in plain language (Search for Stuff), compare two searches side by side, share projects publicly and export results as GeoJSON.

A free Open tier (up to 50 searches a day) is open to anyone; a Full tier with higher quotas, Deep Search and API access is granted on request after review. In a collaboration with Earth Genome, Mongabay journalists used Earth Index to find narcotrafficking airstrips in the Peruvian Amazon, and a Radio Free Europe investigation used it to locate quarries across the Western Balkans.