With daily imagery over ports and coastlines, one of the most useful potential applications of Planet’s Dove imagery is the detection and classification of maritime vessels. Ship tracking has a vital role in security, but the enormous number of ships at sea at any given time limits the effectiveness of classical, human-powered […]
The date of sowing (or planting) of an agricultural field has an enormous influence over crop health and yield. With climate change, in many cases alteration of sowing dates may be critical for adapting to changing temperature and precipitation. Sowing too early can increase the risk of frost damage, while sowing too […]
Landslides pose a major threat to people and property throughout the world, and particularly in landslide-prone regions. Improving our ability to monitor those landslides can improve mitigation, and may ultimately reveal approaches that could predict certain types of landslides in the future. Omid Ghorbanzadeh, from the University of Salzburg, and his team […]
Global agriculture implicates roughly ¾ of all freshwater use on Earth. With demand on the global food supply increasing with population growth, and agricultural systems falling under greater stress due to climate change, water security is under increased risk. Remote sensing of evapotranspiration—the amount of water evaporated off, or transpired by vegetation—offers […]
When working with forest carbon stocks and emissions, it is notable that there is no strictly “true” data. In order to directly measure carbon in forests, one would need to cut the vegetation, dry it, weigh it, chip it up, and push it through a mass spectrometer. This being a self-defeating enterprise, […]
Lianas—woody vines, including grapes—are structural parasites. Climbing on their hosts to get to the sunlight means lianas can spend less energy supporting themselves, devoting more to producing leaves and fruit. The risk is that their wood is less robust to stress, like freezing cold temperatures. As the water in the plant’s veins […]
In November, 2016, Haifa, Israel experienced a fire on the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), causing damage to homes and other infrastructure in the urban forest landscape. The damage was visible in several Earth Observation datasets, including MODIS, Sentinel-2, and the Planet Dove constellation. Yaron Michael, in the Department of Geography and Environment at […]
Many communities live in mountainous or glaciated terrain, with a constant threat of landslides and avalanches. Remote sensing methods, including construction of digital elevation models (DEMs), have the potential to detect deformation of the Earth’s surface—not only horizontally, but also vertically. While active sensors like radar are excellent for detecting this 3D […]
Classic remote sensing for agricultural relies heavily on indices like NDVI (Normalized Differential Vegetation Index), which uses information from the red and near-infrared portions of the spectrum to provide an indicator of vegetation greenness and vitality. However, other indices, often implicating other parts of the spectrum, may provided added and actionable information […]
Straddling the South Dakota-Wyoming border, the Black Hills region is characterized by karst features—caves, sinkholes and other landforms created as water erodes dolomite and limestone deposits. Given the importance of water in creating karst formations, climate change has the potential to alter karst intensity. Barbara Theilen-Willige, Professor at Technical University Berlin, used […]
