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 […]
In 2016, two glaciers in Tibet sheered down to their bed, erupting into avalanches. The first disaster killed nine people. A major study, published in Nature Geosciences, examined Planet imagery in the months leading up to the avalanches, and their aftermath. The work was subsequently featured in the The New York Times: “‘…it […]
Using the Yukon Flats in Alaska as the test study area, Sarah Cooley and colleagues evaluated the potential scientific utility of the Planet Dove constellation for hydrologic modeling and research. The study concluded that Planet imagery can improve mapping and tracking changing inundation extent of hundreds of small, heterogeneous water bodies in […]
Jakob Steiner and team use digital elevation models and Landsat imagery in combination with high resolution Planet data to quantify surface elevation changes and flow velocities during a glacial surge of the Khurdopin Glacier. They conclude that the high frequency of Planet imagery is useful to capture peak surge velocities that are […]
Planet’s constellation of satellites, with daily revisit rates and sub 5 m resolution, provides the ability to overcome the usual spatiotemporal restrictions associated with traditional remote sensing. Matt McCabe and team explore the suitability of Planet imagery for an array of retrieval opportunities pertinent to hydrology, including leaf area index (LAI) and […]
While Planet’s constellation of satellites currently operates in sun-synchronous orbit, the first generations of Doves were deployed out of the International Space Station (ISS) and therefore do not obey such an orbit. Their configuration in the ISS orbit samples at different local times within the mid-latitudes, and consequently, it is in theory […]
In late 2016, Greg Asner, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, led a field survey of the spectacularly diverse Spratly Islands archipelago. The mission combined in-water diving and photography with Planet’s Dove data in order to map coral reefs and assess the damage they face from military base expansion. Greg described the […]
Coral reefs—ecosystems that are both ecologically important and sensitive—are disappearing rapidly due to direct human impacts such as overfishing and pollution. Given the remote and often inaccessible geography of reefs, these critical habitats can be difficult to monitor. Research in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea is helping to change […]
