How Governments Use Near-Daily Earth Data to Increase Operational Efficiency

Save time and resources with broad area management.

Time is a scarce resource in government. On top of the administrative work required to keep programs running, agencies need to monitor emerging issues, respond to unexpected events, and document decisions at every step of the way.

Making informed decisions often requires collecting, managing, and harmonizing vast amounts of data. Delays in issue discovery, analysis, resolution, and reporting can impact public health, natural resources, and regional economic growth.

We can’t increase the number of hours in every day, but we can help governments discover and respond to new issues faster. Powered by the world’s largest constellation of Earth imaging satellites, our unified data and analytics products bring governments the ability to rapidly characterize changes over vast areas and multiple time scales. We call this approach broad area management.

Governments Are Adopting Broad Area Management to Improve Efficiency

By combining our analysis-ready Earth data with administrative datasets and public imagery, governments can see detailed changes across dispersed areas, prioritize issues, and accelerate decisions.

How do governments save time with Planet data?

• Automate change detection: Use automated road and building change detection to identify new development on a weekly basis.
  
  
• Pre-plan regular site inspections: Verify compliance and reduce total onsite time before regular inspections.
  
  
• Reduce manual processing and data analysis bottlenecks: Query, process, visualize, and analyze high volumes of Earth data and generate relevant statistics within seconds using Planet Insights Platform.
  
  
• Accelerate issue resolution: Use near-daily imagery to identify when changes occurred and reduce onsite investigation time.
  
  
• Keep internal and public-facing dashboards up to date: Deliver more accurate and timely information to diverse audiences.

As agencies implement more digital transformation initiatives, Planet can help accelerate processes and free up time for more complex tasks that require creativity, judgment, and problem-solving skills.

Spotlight: Brazilian Federal Police and SCCON Geospatial

Many of the world’s biodiversity hotspots are also threatened by illegal deforestation, bushfires, mining, and drug trafficking. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Amazon region. The Brazilian Federal Police is responsible for preventing and addressing criminal activity across much of the territory. However, the region’s scale, terrain, and climate pose enormous enforcement challenges.

In the past, the Federal Police tried to monitor vast areas of the country using free satellite images. However, public imagery was usually unavailable for key areas of interest or obscured by clouds. Images without clouds often lacked the resolution to generate useful insights. Limited imagery caused delays. All of these challenges made the process of investigation and analysis more difficult and time-consuming.

Near-daily images from Planet have changed the game. A Planet partner, SCCON Geospatial, used Planet data to build a custom platform with change-detection alerts notifying authorities of changes in forest cover within days, allowing the Federal Police to prioritize interventions and accelerate investigations.

The SCCON platform is so effective that the Brazilian government has expanded access to over 450 institutions and over 96,000 users across the government through RedeMAIS (Brasil MAIS Program Network), an ecosystem for sharing data, information, and unique knowledge of the entire national territory.¹

^{SCCON Platform alerts — powered by Planet data — make it possible to identify changes generated by fire scars, planting of illegal crops, deforestation, degradation, illegal mining, and illegal airstrips.}

Do More With Planet Insights Platform

We’re making it easier for more government users to access Earth data with our unified experience, Planet Insights Platform. It’s a powerful set of APIs that bring governments the ability to look broader, look back, look closer, and look deeper.

Interested in learning more? Learn how Planet can help governments improve compliance and better manage subsidy payouts. Or, download our e-book, Driving Program and Policy Effectiveness With Planet.

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_{1. For the most recent program data, please see https://plataforma-pf.sccon.com.br/#/reports.}