I've long thought that Google Earth and Maps represent great tools for these organizations. Land trusts often operate on a shoestring budgets and rely on the honorable efforts of volunteers. The work of local land trusts is very important, as they work cooperatively with the entire community to preserve open space, create trails and simply make our communities better places to live. The subject was using Google Earth and Maps as tools for land conservation. On Friday, I presented to the Northern Region Council of Land Trusts in Fortuna, California.

You can then contact the data provider listed by visiting their website and see if they have more recent imagery available. What if you need more recent imagery than what's available in Google Earth? If that's the case, we recommend that you zoom in on the area you're interested in, and look at the copyright information displayed in the bottom of the Google Earth window. To do that, we'd need hundreds, if not thousands of satellites all running 24 hours a day to capture imagery. Will this lead to real-time imagery? Probably not any time in the near future. We're working on making the process better, and we've teamed up with GeoEye to get imagery from their new Geo-Eye 1 satellite, which will be taking high-resolution photographs of large portions of the Earth's surface. We do this because this older image is of a higher resolution or better quality than the newer image we have available. We want to make sure that we're providing you with quality imagery, so we do a lot of checking on the data.Īdditionally, you'll find that we may have new imagery in some areas, and older imagery in areas right next to it. As you can imagine, this entire process of getting a satellite into space, having it take pictures, getting those pictures back to Earth, reviewed, and placed into Google Earth can take some time. For Google Earth, we take the best imagery we can find from these providers and we piece it together on the 3D globe. These companies are the ones that own the satellites, collect the imagery, and offer it to the world. In actuality, we acquire this imagery from many different data providers, including TeleAtlas. The most common question that the Google Earth team receives is 'is the imagery in real time?' The simple answer is 'no.' The better answer is why it can't be.Ī common misconception is that Google collects and owns this imagery.

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