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 […]
Globally, landslides kill ~5,000 people per year. If landslides—including rock falls, mudslides and other surface failures—can be better predicted, these deaths could be avoided. Landslides are highly heterogeneous, both spatially and temporally. They are more common in the steep, mountainous regions of the Earth, but also more frequent during particular seasons due […]
When disaster strikes, accurate information about the scale and scope of impact becomes critical. The first 24 hours are often the most important, and any accurate data may prove life saving. Leveraging data from Planet’s Disaster Program, Bruno Adriano and his team used a variety of data sources and machine learning to […]
In the Arctic and Boreal regions, millions of freshwater lakes influence carbon dioxide and methane emissions to the atmosphere. Lakes that are more dynamic, with a variable shoreline, may have a greater flux of these greenhouse gases. Leveraging the Planet Dove and RapidEye constellations, which collectively image daily and sometimes multiple times […]
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 […]
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 […]
As Planet’s Education and Research Community continues to grow, students are increasingly working with Planet imagery in college courses. At Stanford University, several students recently utilized Planet imagery in Computer Science 230: Deep Learning. Ian Avery Bick, Dennis Wang and Ben Mullet examined deforestation near Kibale National Park in Southern Uganda, an […]
In the midst of a revolution Earth Observation, due to increasingly diverse and temporally dense data feeds enabled by cubesats and other sensors, there is a need to be interoperable across sensors. In the journal Remote Sensing of Environment, Rasmus Houborg and Matt McCabe present the Cubesat-enabled Spatio-Temporal Enhancement Method (CESTEM), which […]
Seagrass beds are one of the most important ecosystems in the Mediterranean region, supporting an enormous diversity of marine fauna. However, with anthropogenic influences including dredging and modification of shorelines, pollution and other drivers, seagrass ecosystems facing increasing threats. To improve monitoring of seagrass extent, Dimosthenis Tranganos and Peter Reinartz from the […]
