“The primary archive available for reviewing the positions of coastlines and effects of sea-level rise is Landsat.”

“In a world of scarce resources, there are distinct tradeoffs in costs and benefits of land use, and whether to conserve or convert forest to cropland. Map-based images are perhaps one of the most succinct means of helping policymakers digest complex ideas of social and economically driven environmental change.”

“We need to drive towards building sustainable cities and human settlements, and this depends on how well we measure these areas and how well we can predict the growth in all these cities in the future. I believe Earth observation and geospatial technologies give us the tools needed in order for us to grow in this direction.”

“That the Landsat data have been so useful, that the program has continued for 50 years, and that people from so many different fields of study continue to be so excited about the data: All that is amazing.”

“Timelapse in Google Earth is possible because of the commitment to open and accessible data through NASA and the United States Geological Survey’s Landsat program (the world’s first and longest-running civilian Earth observation program) and the European Union’s Copernicus program with its Sentinel satellites.”

“Landsat is everywhere, and has been for 40 years.”

“We have a globally consistent, locally relevant map product that can be used in a variety of applications: estimating emissions from deforestation, modeling biodiversity, assessing protected areas, and studying forest and human health. We plan to move our record forward and backward where Landsat has a sufficiently rich archive of data.”

“This project would have been entirely impossible without the free and open-access data policy of the NASA/USGS Landsat-data archive.”