Extract land cover data from Google Earth?

Question

I have latitude-longitude coordinates for a certain region with me. Is it possible that when I enter this data in Google Earth, I can somehow extract the land cover class associated with each coordinate?

Or how can I access the land cover data (if GE already has it online)?

I am new to Google Earth.

Answer 1

As far as I know, Google Earth does not have land use/cover data. It has detailed satellite images that covers most of the globe. You can only visualize your points on Google Earth to see in which region/part of the earth are located. And even if there is a land use/cover data, you still cannot extract those raster information to the point, as you can do in other GIS software like ArcGIS or QGIS.

Answer 2

Though land cover/land use (LCLU) maps are produced from classification of satellite imagery, I don't know if you can find such information in Google Earth. However, you can access this information worldwide from different sources:

• GlobCover (from European Space Agency, global coverage): http://due.esrin.esa.int/page_globcover.php. 2009 seems the last version.
• NASA land cover maps: see http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/view.php?datasetId=MCD12C1_T1

For Europe, you can have a look on:

• Corine Land Cover (Europe only): http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/corine-land-cover-2006-raster-2

Another source might be OpenStreetMap, which has landuse tags (and also the less used landcover tag). An interesting project is this land use map derived from OpenStreetMap:

• http://osmlanduse.org/.

Finally, many countries also produced their own LCLU maps/database. You may check for the countries you want...

As mentioned by @ahmadhanb, after having download these data, you might use a GIS software such as QGIS or ArcGIS to extract land cover classes by location.