A meta-analysis of Google Earth Engine in different scientific domains

Abstract

Google Earth Engine (GEE) is widely utilized as a platform for analyzing large-scale geospatial data due to technological advancements. It has enormous potential for processing, accessing, and monitoring performance in different fields. Also, it offers more significant features than the conventional platform, such as affordability, accessibility, storage capacity, and high performance. However, considering the current need for more detailed reviews, this chapter focused on investigating and evaluating recent trends of GEE and its applications in various fields with countries' contributions to the production of knowledge on earth observation. A systematic review was performed using bibliometric analysis for the collected articles from the Scopus databases from 2015 to 2023. The number of publications related to GEE has shown a gradual increase from 2015, with an annual increase of 12.5%. The leading countries that contributed to producing the studies of GEE were China, the United States, and Germany. More than 50% of research articles were solely published by the Remote Sensing journal from the publisher of Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI). GEE was highly used in several fields, with earth and planetary (37%), environmental studies (20%), agriculture and biological sciences (11%), social science (7%), and computer science (5%). Notably, a handful of studies were available in medicine, arts and humanities, business, accounting, mathematics, chemistry, and chemical engineering. Therefore, this study provides in-depth insights into integrating various ecosystems and fields using GEE for spatiotemporal analysis and monitoring, which can lead to a path to sustainable development through smart and cost-effective technology and nature-based solutions in the future.