alphaearth

R package to search and retrieve data from the AlphaEarth Foundations Satellite Embedding dataset.

Installation

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("m3nin0-labs/alphaearth")

Usage

The typical workflow of the alphaearth package is composed of three steps:

1. Build the local index

index() downloads the AlphaEarth spatial index once (~500 MB) and loads it into a persistent local DuckDB database. The download and load happen a single time. Later calls reuse the cache unless overwrite = TRUE.

alphaearth::index()

2. Search tiles by space and time

search() queries the local index and returns the matching tiles as an sf object (one row per tile), including the tile id, year, and both a plain HTTP url and a streamable /vsicurl/ url for each COG.

tiles <- alphaearth::search(
  roi        = c(
    xmin = -47.9,
    ymin = -15.9, 
    xmax = -47.8, 
    ymax = -15.8
  ),
  start_date = "2020-01-01",
  end_date   = "2022-01-01"
)

tiles

3. Bring the tiles into R

From here, you have three options, each covered in its own article:

Datacubes

as_cube() build an analysis-ready data cube for sits or stars.

# sits
cube <- alphaearth::as_cube(
  x  = tiles, 
  to = "sits"
)

# or stars
cube <- alphaearth::as_cube(
  x  = tiles, 
  to = "stars"
)

For more information, check the vignette("data-cubes")

VRTs

as_vrt() write lightweight virtual rasters (VRT) that stream from the COGs.

# virtual rasters (no pixels downloaded)
vrts <- alphaearth::as_vrt(
  x = tiles,
  output_dir = "embeddings"
)

For more information, check the vignette("downloading")

Download

download() materialise the tiles as local GeoTIFFs (optionally cropped).

# local GeoTIFFs
files <- alphaearth::download(
  x = tiles,
  output_dir = "embeddings",
  multicores = 4
)

For more information, check the vignette("downloading")

Functions

alphaearth is a simple yet complete toolkit, built around five functions:

Function	Purpose
index()	Download the tile index once into a fast local DuckDB database
search()	Find tiles by space, time, and attributes
as_cube()	Export the AlphaEarth data as a datacube (sits or stars)
as_vrt()	Write AlphaEarth files as virtual rasters (VRT)
download()	Download AlphaEarth files to a local directory

Learn more

Full documentation and articles live on the package website:

• Getting started
• Datacubes: sits & stars
• Downloading & virtual rasters

Data representation

Embedding values are stored as signed 8-bit integers. The de-quantization ((v / 127.5)^2 * sign(v)) is not applied in any step performed by alphaearth.

License & attribution

Code is MIT licensed.

Data used in the package is hosted by Source Cooperative. The AlphaEarth Foundations Satellite Embedding dataset is produced by Google and Google DeepMind and is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.