Esri Releases New App to Easily View and Analyze Global Land-Cover Changes
8.2.2023 16:00:00 EET | Business Wire | Press release
Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) maps are an increasingly important tool for decision-makers at local, regional, and national government levels around the world. These maps help inform policy and land management decisions around issues like sustainability, by contextualizing and quantifying the impacts of earth processes and human activity on the environment.
Esri, the global leader in mapping and location intelligence, has now released a new online application, Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer. The app is structured around a web-based version of its own high-resolution global land-cover map, derived from European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. The app is easy to access and leverages the same geographic information system (GIS) technology behind the land-cover map. The app, map, and source Sentinel-2 imagery are all part of the company's ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.
"GIS not only provides the capabilities necessary to produce and share data and maps such as LULC, it also enables users to derive and disseminate insights from such data," said Sean Breyer, Esri program manager for ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. "Generating this information is foundational, and Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer will be invaluable for helping decision-makers unlock critical insights about land use, particularly as sustainability becomes a pressing global concern."
Change analysis is fundamental to deeper understanding of LULC maps, and Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer provides various ways of detecting and reporting changes, including visual change analysis; statistical change analysis; visual change validation; and dynamic charts for percentage changes and trends over time. Other features offered by the app include the following:
- Image services from ArcGIS Living Atlas
- The ability to take data offline (download mode in the app)
- Analysis tools in ArcGIS Online
- ArcGIS developer tools and resources
In 2021, in partnership with Impact Observatory and Microsoft, Esri released the first artificial intelligence (AI)-generated global land-cover map. This subsequently evolved into the LULC annual time series map available today, which includes nine major land cover categories. Annual updates enable year-to-year comparisons for detecting shifts in vegetation and crops, forest extents, bare surfaces, and urban areas. With the recent addition of the 2022 update, the annual land cover time series now includes global coverage from 2017 through 2022.
Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer is a dynamic, ready-to-use application with an intuitive user experience. To explore the app online now, go to livingatlas.arcgis.com/landcoverexplorer.
About Esri
Esri, the global market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, location intelligence, and mapping helps customers unlock the full potential of data to improve operational and business results. Founded in 1969 in Redlands, California, USA, Esri software is deployed in more than 350,000 organizations globally and in over 200,000 institutions in the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Esri has partners and local distributors in over 100 countries on six continents, including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, nonprofits, and universities. With its pioneering commitment to geospatial information technology, Esri engineers the most innovative solutions for digital transformation, the Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics. Visit us at esri.com.
Copyright © 2023 Esri. All rights reserved. Esri, the Esri globe logo, ArcGIS, The Science of Where, esri.com, and @esri.com are trademarks, service marks, or registered marks of Esri in the United States, the European Community, or certain other jurisdictions. Other companies and products or services mentioned herein may be trademarks, service marks, or registered marks of their respective mark owners.
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230208005380/en/
Contact information
Jo Ann Pruchniewski
Public Relations, Esri
Mobile: 301-693-2643
Email: jpruchniewski@esri.com
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
Miro Announces Asia Hub in Singapore to Accelerate Growth Across the Region and Bring AI Collaboration to New Markets17.3.2026 03:00:00 EET | Press release
Miro®, the AI Innovation Workspace for teams, today announced plans to expand its operations in Asia, supporting organisations across the region in their AI transformation journey. Miro is investing in people, resources, and infrastructure as it targets growth in key markets, including Singapore, India, South Korea, and other Southeast Asia countries. As the global innovation centre of gravity shifts toward Asia – where R&D spending reached 45% of global investment in 2024 – the organisations leading this charge need tools and platforms built for the complexity and pace of modern innovation and collaboration. Miro's AI-powered innovation workspace is uniquely positioned to support this moment. Miro gives organisations the shared context layer they need to move from insight to execution faster than ever before. For Asia's most ambitious innovators, where speed-to-market and cross-border collaboration are existential priorities, Miro provides the link between human creativity and AI capa
IQM and Zurich Instruments Launch Real-Time Quantum Error Correction Demonstrator with NVIDIA NVQLink16.3.2026 23:24:00 EET | Press release
Today, IQM Quantum Computers and Zurich Instruments announce a joint project to build and operate a real-time quantum error correction (QEC) demonstrator, enabled by the NVIDIA NVQLink platform. This project marks a significant milestone toward scalable and fault-tolerant quantum computing designed for enterprise and datacenter deployment. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260316511715/en/ IQM and Zurich Instruments launch real-time quantum error correction demonstrator with NVIDIA NVQLink As enterprises and public institutions worldwide move from quantum exploration to long-term deployment, the challenge has evolved beyond simply accessing quantum hardware. The focus is now on reliably operating quantum computers, seamlessly integrating them into existing compute infrastructure, and scaling them toward fault tolerance. The announced project directly addresses these needs by focusing on full-system integration f
NetApp Accelerates Momentum in AI Leadership with NVIDIA16.3.2026 22:30:00 EET | Press release
NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, today announced enhancements to its enterprise-grade data platform, enabling customers to remove roadblocks to AI innovation. In addition to supporting the latest innovations from NVIDIA announced at GTC, NetApp is launching NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE)—a secure, unified AI data platform stack co-engineered with NVIDIA and integrated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design. A foundational challenge for AI is enabling enterprises to discover, understand, and govern the data they have across their global data estates. If data is AI’s fuel, finding and using the best data is essential to making truly transformative AI. NetApp AIDE helps enterprises solve this need through an automatically created—and continuously updated—global metadata catalog with powerful search capabilities. Critically, the NetApp AIDE metadata catalog goes beyond standard file system metadata and actively analyzes file content to semantica
Lenovo Brings Production-Scale AI to Global Sports: Enhancing Fan Experience, Driving Revenue Growth, Boosting Performance, and Improving Operational Efficiency with NVIDIA16.3.2026 22:30:00 EET | Press release
At NVIDIA GTC today, Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) announced an expanded multiyear collaboration with NVIDIA to help the global sports industry deploy production-scale AI across mission-critical environments, transforming live data into revenue growth, operational resilience, and real-time decision advantage. The global sports technology market is projected to grow from $23 billion in 2025 to more than $60 billion by 2030. Global sports events represent some of the most complex and demanding operating environments in any industry, combining unprecedented scale, technical sophistication, and public visibility. These events engage billions of viewers worldwide, generate and process petabytes of data in real time, and require highly coordinated, distributed operations across multiple countries, all within a context where reliability, resilience, and uninterrupted performance are non-negotiable. Scaling AI across this ecosystem requires validated infrastructure, domain-trained intelligen
Lattice Joins NVIDIA Halos Ecosystem to Advance Safety for Physical AI with Holoscan Sensor Bridge16.3.2026 22:30:00 EET | Press release
Lattice Semiconductor (NASDAQ: LSCC), the low power programmable leader, today announced it has joined the NVIDIA Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab ecosystem, the first ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) accredited inspection lab for AI-driven physical systems. Announced at the NVIDIA GTC 2026, Lattice will engage with NVIDIA and other Halos ecosystem members to build Halos-certified Holoscan Sensor Bridge-based designs for physical AI and to help shape best practices as the industry evolves. “Physical AI is rapidly moving from controlled environments into the real world, where safety, reliability, and trust are paramount,” said Raemin Wang, Vice President, Segment Marketing, Lattice Semiconductor. “Through this collaboration, Lattice looks forward to contributing our expertise in low power FPGAs and award-winning solution stacks to enable scalable, trusted physical AI systems across robotics, industrial automation, and autonomous applications.” NVIDIA Halos is a comprehensive full
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom