Plotting images from Google Earth Engine?

Question

I am trying to plot GEE images as standalone figures (e.g., JPEG or PNG) for publications, however, I have not been able to find a standard method for doing that. For example, I have a landcover image and want to plot a bounding box of landcover pixels together with a legend that describes the label corresponding to the colors of each pixel. Is there a way to use something like Matplotlib in Python to create the figure? How do I do that? Here is a sample GEE image and how I would like the final product to look like:

import ee
ee.Initialize()

landcover = ee.ImageCollection('USGS/NLCD_RELEASES/2016_REL').filter(ee.Filter.eq('system:index', '2016')).first().select('landcover')

roi = ee.FeatureCollection(ee.Geometry.Polygon(
    [[[-121.214213, 39.102459],
      [-121.214213, 39.109467],
      [-121.199295, 39.109467],
      [-121.199295, 39.102459],
      [-121.214213, 39.102459]]]))

Answer 1

You can use the geetools extention and all the matplolib bindings that have been coded there. Specifically to create a static map of an image you can use the plot

For your sepecific use case, using the specified roi and landcover image, that would do:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.ticker import FuncFormatter

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

landcover.geetools.plot(bands = ["landcover"], ax=ax, region=roi)

ax.set_xlabel("Longitude")
ax.set_ylabel("Latitude")
ax.tick_params(axis='both', which='both', length=0, labelbottom=False, labelleft=False)
ax.set_title("Landcover over a random AOI")
fig.colorbar(ax.images[0], label="landcover")

plt.show()

You can then play with the cmap and colorbar of the figure to make it fit exactly with your need.