How to Use the Site
Remote Sensing Labs is a concept-first learning site about turning satellite and aerial imagery into understanding. It is being built out one page at a time, so this guide describes how the material is meant to fit together and where to begin today, rather than assuming you will read it front to back.
How the material is organized
The site is designed around durable remote sensing concepts — the ideas that stay true regardless of which software you use — and then connects those concepts to real data, workflows, and engineering practice. The What is Remote Sensing Labs? page lays out that intended structure in three connected layers: concepts as the foundation (image structure, resolution and coordinate systems, spectral bands and indices, classification, and time series), data and workflows that apply those ideas to open imagery, and engineering practice that makes the analysis reproducible and scalable.
Google Earth Engine is treated as one implementation track among several — a fast way to try a concept in the browser — rather than the identity of the site. Where it helps, the material also points toward Python (rasterio, xarray, geopandas) and open, cloud-native data, so the concept stays in focus rather than any single platform.
Because the site is mid-migration from an Earth Engine course into this broader resource, some of those concept and workflow sections are still being written. The Roadmap is the honest picture of what exists now, what is planned, and the order in which pages are being reworked. If a topic you expect is not yet a page, the roadmap is where to confirm it is coming.
Where to start
Pick an entry point by what you are trying to do rather than reading linearly:
- New to remote sensing. Begin with What is Remote Sensing Labs? to build a mental model of how the site approaches imagery, then read the Roadmap to see which concept pages are available and which are on the way. This gives you a foundation that does not depend on any one tool.
- Already work with imagery. Go straight to the Roadmap to find the concept-first sequence — image structure, projections and scale, visualization, indices, classification, time series, and reproducible workflow design — and identify the pages most relevant to the problem in front of you. The orientation page explains how each layer supports a different kind of analysis task.
- Following the project. The blog tracks how the site is evolving as pages are modernized, and the Contact page is the place to reach out with questions or suggestions.
What to expect as you read
Treat concept pages as the durable core: they are meant to remain useful as tools change. Implementation details — Earth Engine, Python, STAC catalogs, desktop GIS — are shown as tracks layered on top of a concept, so you can follow the idea first and then choose how to run it. As the migration continues, the original Earth Engine examples stay available until a replacement has been tested, so you can always fall back to a working example while newer, platform-aware material fills in.