How far it is scientifically justified to use GoogleEarth Pro application to map forest areas - change in forest cover over a time scale of say 10 or 20 yrs? have you used it to address any research problem? If yes, then please share your experience/thoughts/published articles.
Google Earth has been used to map forest areas in several projects. Not my own papers, but some of these may be of interest:
Article Participatory mapping of forest plantations with Open Foris ...
Article A mangrove forest map of China in 2015: Analysis of time ser...
Article A 30-m Landsat-derived Cropland Extent Product of Australia ...
Yes, it can be used. this is the only map update. It so happens that the forest has not been updated for several years. If it is important to you, you will not be able to properly monitoring. Regards, Sergey Viktorovich Pushkin
Dear Dola Bhattacharjee
Thanks for this question and discussion.
For sure, you could use Google Earth Pro images to map forest areas if you know the acquisition date. On the contrary, it is easy to download Sentinel images or a higher spatial resolution image (if available). You could then employ them to map the forest area by several techniques, such as image segmentation and machine learning.
Good luck.
You can monitor forest changes through the visual interpretation of Google Earth multi-temporal high-resolution images. It should be noted that the time-series images may not be available for a region on a regular basis. But usually from 2011 onwards, at least one high-resolution image is available for each year. Given this limitation, Google Earth images can be used for annual monitoring of the forest area/density changes.
Good luck
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