Use Norway’s International Climate and Forests Initiative (NICFI) - Planet Lab data#

Overview#

Through NICFI, anyone can now access Planet’s high-resolution, analysis-ready mosaics of the world’s tropics to help reduce and reverse the loss of tropical forests, combat climate change, conserve biodiversity, and facilitate sustainable development.

In support of NICFI’s mission, you can use this data for a number of purposes, including, but not limited to:

advancing scientific research about the world’s tropical forests and the critical services they provide;
implementing and improving policies for sustainable forest management and land use in developing tropical forest countries and jurisdictions;
increasing transparency and accountability in the tropics;
protecting and improving the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in tropical forest countries; and
innovating solutions towards reducing pressure on forests from global commodities and financial markets.

The NICFI & Planet Basemaps for Tropical Forest Monitoring are now available in Google Earth Engine (GEE) and SEPAL for easy processing. In a few simple steps, you can create your own custom mosaics using the Planet basemaps.

The first step is to make sure you have a GEE account. You can follow this tutorial to register for a GEE account if you don’t already have one.

Sign up for NICFI imagery#

Sign up for NICFI Planet data access using the same email address associated with your GEE account. To sign up for access to the NICFI data program, go to https://www.planet.com/nicfi/.

Click on the Sign up button and fill in the form.

After submitting the form, an email will be sent with a link to activate your account. Please check your email for an invitation to complete the sign up process.

Click on the link and a new form will appear. Complete the form and you will receive a success message with a new page to sign in to your account.

Tip

If you are already a NICFI user and would like to access the basemaps in GEE, go to www.planet.com/nicfi/?gee=show to apply for access.

Note

Approval for accessing NICFI-Planet Basemaps in GEE can take up to one week.

Access NICFI through GEE#

The NICFI Planet data can also be accessed from GEE, allowing you to use the PlanetLab imagery in SEPAL recipes, such as Classification or Time series, by authorizing your GEE account to access PlanetLab data.

Go to the Planet Platform Explorer and select My Account in the upper-right corner.

Select All Plans (2), which should activate NICFI level 1 data access (1). If it does, select My settings (3) and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Select Edit access (1) in the lower-right.
Select all of the checkboxes (2) and enter the email address (3) associated with your GEE account.
Select Connect to Earth Engine (4) to finalize the registration.

Note

To connect to GEE, your GEE email address must be the same as the email address used for SEPAL.

The next step is to make sure SEPAL is connected to the same email address that has access to NICFI-Planet Basemaps in GEE using the same process as in GEE.

Note: If you are already connected to a Google account with access to NICFI-Planet Basemaps in GEE, you can skip the next step.

If you are either not connected to your Google account or connected via a different email address that does not have access to the NICFI-Planet Basemaps, select Google account and choose the email address that has access to NICFI-Planet Basemaps in GEE.

Note

Allow SEPAL to access your GEE data and Google Drive account, which are required components for processing.

Important

For additional information that may help when processing the NICFI/Planet high-resolution imagery in SEPAL, please refer to the section of Planet Academy dedicated to NICFI imagery.

Use Norway’s International Climate and Forests Initiative (NICFI) - Planet Lab data#

Sign up for NICFI and connect with Google Earth Engine (GEE)#

Overview#

Sign up for NICFI imagery#

Access NICFI through GEE#