Earth Genome / Earth Index

Earth Genome, the maker, is a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit that works on environmental problems with AI, science and design.^1,2 A user of Earth Index marks a handful of known locations as positive or negative examples of what they are looking for, and the tool compares these with embeddings from large Earth foundation models and returns similar-looking places.^1,2 Embeddings are compact numerical summaries of each patch of imagery, produced by AI models trained on large amounts of satellite data.^1,3 The user reviews the hits, adds labels, runs the search again and exports the result.¹

Earth Genome's examples are large cattle operations, illegal mining in the Amazon and clandestine airstrips in the Peruvian Amazon.¹ Other listed search targets are waste water, road building, logging and waste sites.¹ The organisation works with Climate TRACE on facility-level emissions, with journalists at Mongabay, and with policy makers through Amazon Mining Watch.² A guest post on its blog (21 September 2026) describes a second-stage classifier run over Google's AlphaEarth embeddings.³ In Germany it raised the precision of cattle-facility detections (the share of hits that are correct) by about 18 percentage points while keeping most of the detections.³

Earth Index is a hosted web application with user accounts.¹ It reads every band of Sentinel-2 imagery, and every region of the Earth is indexed for live search.¹ Pricing is not published. Change detection with notifications, and training of detection models in the cloud, are listed as upcoming.¹