A summary of the special issue on remote sensing of land change science with Google earth engine

Abstract To embrace the burgeoning land change science studies that exploit public-domain cloud-computing platforms such as Google Earth Engine (GEE), for the first time, we organized a special issue entitled “Remote Sensing of Land Change Science with Google Earth Engine” in the journal “Remote Sensing of Environment”. This paper serves as a summary to a collection of 19 papers that have been published since the inception of the special issue in November 2017. In particular, we summarized their contributions with regard to two perspectives: what new themes of questions are articulated, what contributions have been made. Taking account of the disciplinary difference, we carried out the summary separately in two major science domains: Remote Sensing of Environment (RSE), i.e., naturally-induced land change, and Remote Sensing of Society (RSS), i.e., human-induced land change. Furthermore, we presented a historical review of the developments of GEE-relevant studies published before our special issue. Finally, we provided a future prospect on how GEE will continue to evolve to further the study of land change science.