How-to: Create stratified sampling designs in CEO

Collect Earth Online supports using your own polygon shapefiles to create random and gridded stratified sampling designs! 

🥽 Implementing stratified sampling in your project

Using the stratified sampling feature in CEO is easy. Simply upload a zipped shapefile containing multiple polygons or with a multipart polygon. You can use shapefiles with just a few polygons or many!

CEO will load your shapefile and show you a preview in the Collection Map Preview pane. You will also see information about the size of each strata (polygon or polygon part) under Plot properties. You can mouse over each strata in the list to highlight it in the Collection Map Preview pane.

To use CEO’s stratified sampling feature, select the Random or Gridded option under Spatial Distribution.

Then, select either the number of plots per strata for random sampling or the desired distance between plots for gridded sampling. This setting will be applied to each strata. For example, if you are using stratified sampling and want 25 samples per strata, the total number of plots in the project will be 75.

You can now finish creating your project! After you create the project, your Project Details page will show you the random or gridded sampling output under Collection Design.

CEO would like to thank its ongoing funders FAO, NASA–USAID SERVIR, and SilvaCarbon, a US government program. Thanks also to CEO’s technology partners: Norway’s International Climate & Forests Initiative for funding open high-resolution data availability; Planet for providing high-resolution imagery; and the Google Earth Engine team for creating a platform for Earth science data and analysis.

Collect Earth Online is working constantly to improve the user experience, and your feedback is invaluable. If you have ideas to share, please write to support@collect.earth.

Thank you!