Permafrost is defined as ground that remains below freezing for multiple years in a row. This frozen ground is hard as concrete. However, rising temperatures from climate change are leading to thawing of this permafrost, impacting local ecosystems and infrastructure. Thaw also results in the release of significant amounts of methane into […]
Above Image: Point Lay, Alaska research site @ 2021, Planet Labs, Inc. Please note that walruses may not be present in this image, but can be seen in the referenced research paper. Walruses are coming ashore along the coasts of Alaska more frequently and in increasing numbers due to the decline in […]
Past studies have explored the use of flowing ice debris to estimate stream velocity with Planet data. However, tropical rivers pose a distinct challenge, due to high cloud cover and turbidity. Adriano Junqueira, of São Paulo State University, led a team to deploy a novel approach in the Araguaia River watershed in […]
Seasonal changes in vegetation in ecosystems are strongly tied to factors such as carbon and water cycle fluxes. Traditionally, monitoring these changes—called phenology—at high resolution has required the deployment of PhenoCams on the ground. A new study by Moon et al. (2021) compares the performance of PlanetScope data to Harmonized Landsat-8 and […]
A team of researchers led by Professor Jin Wu, at the University of Hong Kong, has been studying tropical and temperate forest phenology—the rhythms and periods of life. Aided by the high revisit rate of Dove satellites, Jing Wang and team detected dry season vegetation patterns in the Amazon: many tropical trees […]
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, humanity noted several effects of lockdowns on the Earth system from orbit, including vacant highways, and reductions in air pollution. People affected in Venice reported that the local waters were clearer than they had been in decades. Milad Niroumand-Jadidi and colleagues at the University of Trento and […]
Improving crop yields, vigor and health, can be facilitated by better monitoring of the cross-sectional area of vegetation—i.e., Leaf Area Index or LAI. However, measuring LAI on the ground is time consuming and expensive. Sentinel-2, operated by the European Space Agency, publishes a global LAI product; but at 10m resolution and a […]
Glacial lakes in mountainous regions are prone to outburst floods that can devastate entire communities. With climate change, glacial ice is thinning and retreating in the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Himalaya region, posing an increasing threat to human life and requiring improved monitoring. Nida Qayyum, in the Department of Space Science at […]
On a rapidly changing Earth, space-based imaging provides one of the most critical inputs to our scientific understanding of the whole Earth system. With the rapid increase in the number of medium- to high-resolution imaging sensors, there is increasing need for standard calibration methodology. An increase in sensor fusion, in which researchers […]
Change in vegetation color, chemistry and metabolic activity is one of the most striking signals of life in our biosphere. Satellite imagery plays an important role in effectively retrieving and mapping these vegetation changes over time—also called phenology. The rapid revisit period of the PlanetScope cubesat constellation provides researchers with a unique […]
