Glossary & FAQ

Definitions for the terms that appear across the viewer and the data pages — and answers to questions that keep coming up.

Coming soon — this section is being expanded.

Below is the list of terms we plan to define. If something you ran into isn't here, please flag it via Contact and we'll add it.

Planned glossary entries

AOI — Area of Interest, the polygon you draw or pick on the map
Analyzed area — the per-layer area, in acres, where the COG carries real values for your AOI. May be smaller than the polygon's geographic area when the layer has NoData over water or source-data gaps. See Pixel counts and analyzed area.
Buffer ring — concentric ring drawn around an AOI for context comparisons in reports
COG — Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF, the raster format we host on S3
NoData — sentinel value marking pixels where a layer has no measurement (water, off-grid, source gaps). Excluded from all summary statistics and pixel-count totals.
Scale factor — multiplier applied to raw integer pixel values to recover real-world units
30 m pixel — the spatial unit for most layers; ~0.22 acres each
Class breaks — binning continuous values into ordinal categories for display
Categorical vs continuous — nominal class codes vs. measurable quantities
Native vs display — values as stored in the COG vs. how the viewer renders them