Combating climate change by mapping soil carbon levels globally with Google Earth Engine

Editor’s note: Today's article comes from David Schurman, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Perennial. David shares how Perennial has been able to increase the scope and precision of its soil carbon level maps with its migration to Google Earth Engine—enabling Perennial to double revenues while helping customers fight climate change through regenerative agriculture.

I was working as an intern at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, analysing air samples in an atmosphere lab in Colorado, when the news broke from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii that the carbon level had reached 400 ppm. Climate scientists had warned us for years that exceeding this threshold would put the planet on a dangerous path to overheating. At that moment, I knew I wanted to dedicate myself to finding a solution to heal the planet.

However, my research left me increasingly frustrated. Humanity generates 50 gigatons of carbon emissions annually, and I was searching for a climate remediation solution that was both rapid and scalable. The geoengineering techniques I studied, such as light-reflecting aerosols and carbon-capture machines, either posed serious risks like disrupting vital monsoon patterns or were too slow to implement effectively.

The answer to climate change was closer than I thought. While working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, analysing Martian rocks and soil for signs of past life, I had a revelation. The solution to preserving life on Earth was right beneath my feet: soil.

Elements of digital soil mapping.

Industrialised agriculture has released tens of billions of metric tons of carbon from the soil, leaving unfarmable dirt closer to what you might see at a construction site in its wake. But because soil is scalable, readily available, and behaves predictably, it has the potential to repair the damage 100 years of industrialised farming, and other types of carbon-belching industrialization, have done to our planet. 

Regenerative—or “sustainable”—agriculture has the power to turn dirt back into soil. I co-founded Perennial with longtime colleague and friend Jack Roswell to do just that. 

Locate, measure, monitor, report, and verify

For regenerative agricultural practices to take hold, you have to be able to find the most promising available arable land, measure carbon and greenhouse gas levels, monitor the soil over time, and report and verify potential benefits to the climate. 

Perennial uses Google Earth Engine to create maps of soil health, changes to carbon content, and other important soil ecosystem metrics. Earth Engine’s scalability, flexibility, reliability, and cost-effectiveness are enabling us to provide this service anywhere on the planet. 

Perennial has integrated over 350,000 soil samples into our digital soil mapping models. But the process is about more than simply mapping the measurements we take. We combine hundreds of data points from dozens of other sources—30 years’ worth—using our algorithms to develop biophysical indicators from satellite data that predict and describe soil conditions. Through this rigorous approach, we can perform audit-ready measurements of soil carbon and ecosystem health with a fraction of the soil samples and farm information that would have otherwise been required.

Soil sampling in the field to accurately capture measurements.

Perennial's datasets enable food, fiber, and agriculture companies to mitigate climate change by incentivising farmers to adopt regenerative agriculture practices. By measuring, monitoring, reporting, and verifying the climate impact of regenerative agriculture, we provide companies with proof of the impact of these incentives.

Ultimately, our AI- and ML-based algorithms are building a foundational model for soils anywhere on the globe, and hold the key to making the Earth a giant carbon sink.

Displaying carbon use efficiency.

The enormous computing resources required for AI modeling led us to migrate Perennial's remote sensing data, orchestration pipelines, and AI-modeled data to Google Cloud Platform. Data points on lab-analyzed soil samples, essential for training our AI models, were moved to BigQuery.

Google Cloud was the obvious choice, given my experience with all major cloud platforms. Its individual components are seamlessly integrated for ease of use, and their reliability allows our engineers to concentrate on product development. The platform's scalability enables us to map data globally, and it integrated smoothly into our existing workflows for a swift setup.

Google's pioneering role in the cloud-based geospatial ecosystem and Google Earth Engine's shared vision of AI-driven climate resilience made joining the Earth Engine community a priority for us.

Displaying microbial soil temperature index.

Working with Google partner Woolpert Digital Innovations, we built a proof of concept. We then moved hundreds of thousands of rows of training data and all our orchestration pipelines to Google Cloud, as well as tens of thousands of lines of code and hundreds of thousands of data points to BigQuery, in just three months. By anyone’s measurement, the migration has been a success.

Less carbon, more revenue

Our engineering costs have been reduced due to a 10x increase in AI model-iteration speed, a 10x increase in data volume crunched, and a 5x increase in global data coverage.

These advancements have enabled us to verify the removal of hundreds of thousands of metric tons of atmospheric carbon and serve more clients across a larger global area. As a result, our revenue doubled between 2023 and 2024, and we're on track to multiply 2024's revenue by five in 2025.

Regenerative agriculture is transforming the global food system and agricultural ecosystem management. Sustainable farming practices, facilitated by Google Earth Engine, Google AI, and the Google Cloud Platform, help prevent the planet from overheating by returning carbon to the soil, ensuring Earth remains habitable for future generations. Perennial is instrumental in enabling farmers to receive payment for implementing these sustainable practices.

Want your business to benefit from Google Maps platform? Get in touch today! 

(Source: https://mapsplatform.google.com/resources/blog/combating-climate-change-by-mapping-soil-carbon-levels-globally-with-google-earth-engine/)