Planet Announces Winner of Copernicus Masters Challenge

The Copernicus Masters is an international competition that awards prizes to developers who leverage Earth observation data to solve important commercial and social problems. As first time participants this year, we issued a call for submissions to the Planet Daily Change Challenge: a search for novel applications of Planet’s daily, global imaging capabilities. After an evaluation by a panel of multidisciplinary experts, we headed to Marseille, France to join industry and institutional leaders at the the Awards Ceremony of the Copernicus Masters to formally announce our winner, 20tree.ai!

A Portuguese startup focused on forest intelligence, 20tree.ai was initially introduced to Planet at a 2017 Kaggle competition where the team leveraged Planet satellite data to detect deforestation, specifically in the Amazon rainforest. From there, founders Indra and Anniek looked to monitor forest health more broadly, and began using both Planet and Copernicus data to gain valuable insights into the health of our forests for near real-time forest inventory and sustainable forest management.

20tree.ai’s scalable and cost-efficient solution combines Planet’s daily monitoring with Copernicus’ Sentinel 1 and 2 data to help forest industry companies, NGOs, and governments improve their decisions on a global scale.

Planet’s Agnieszka Lukaszczyk (right) with 20tree.ai co-founders, Anniek Schouten (center) and Indra den Bakker (left)

“It’s always exciting to see our satellite data being utilized in such innovative ways,” says Agnieszka Lukaszczyk, Senior Director of European Affairs at Planet. “We were very impressed with 20tree.ai’s forest health monitoring dashboard and believe it has strong growth potential, as they already have an established knowledge of the market and have been exploring possibilities with existing customers.”

We’re excited to follow 20tree.ai’s journey as they build a meaningful forest monitoring solution and connect with new customers and markets. Follow along @planetlabs and @20tree.ai for more updates on the project!