RePlant Alfa: Integrating Google Earth Engine and R Coding to Support the Identification of Priority Areas for Ecological Restoration | Land Portal

Resource information

Date of publication: 
January 2023
Resource Language: 
ISBN / Resource ID: 
LP-midp000916
Copyright details: 
© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article

Land degradation and climate change are among the main threats to the sustainability of ecosystems worldwide. As a result, the restoration of degraded landscapes is essential to maintaining the functionality of ecosystems, especially those with greater social, economic, and environmental vulnerability. Nevertheless, policymakers are frequently challenged by deciding where to prioritize restoration actions, which usually includes dealing with multiple and complex needs under an always limited budget. If these decisions are not taken based on proper data and processes, restoration implementation can easily fail. In order to help decision-makers take informed decisions on where to implement restoration activities, we have developed a semiautomatic geospatial platform to prioritize areas for restoration activities based on ecological, social, and economic variables. This platform takes advantage of the potential to integrate R coding, Google Earth Engine cloud computing, and GIS visualization services to generate an interactive geospatial decision-maker tool for restoration. Here, we present a prototype version called “RePlant alpha”, which was tested with data from the Central Zone of Chile. This exercise proved that integrating R and GEE was feasible, and that the analysis with at least six indicators for a specific region was also feasible to implement even from a personal computer. Therefore, the use of a virtual machine in the cloud with a large number of indicators over large areas is both possible and practical.

Authors and Publishers

Author(s), editor(s), contributor(s): 

Morales, Narkis S.Fernández, Ignacio C.Durán, Leonardo P.Pérez-Martínez, Waldo A.

Corporate Author(s): 
Publisher(s): 

MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.

Data provider

MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.