Quarterly Product Release Roundup: Integrations, Planet Explorer and More

It’s been a banner year for product releases, from Planet Basemap updates to Next-Generation PlanetScope to Planet Analytic Feeds. Big releases are great, but just like holiday stocking stuffers, it’s sometimes the smaller things that people love most. We wanted to highlight a few recent releases that may appear simple, but are bringing significant value to our customers.

As previewed at Planet Explore, we launched two new integrations that will help our customers bring Planet imagery into their preferred mapping and analysis environments and combine our data with their authoritative content and other geospatial data to generate new, unexpected insights.

Previously, the Planet ArcGIS Pro Add-in enabled our customers to bring Planet Basemaps into the Esri ArcGIS Pro environment. In version 2.0, released this month, the add-in now supports PlanetScope and SkySat imagery, as well as public sensors like Landsat and Sentinel. With this update, customers will be able to take advantage of all Planet imagery products and leverage the tools and features of ArcGIS Pro to enhance their analysis.

In addition to ArcGIS Pro, many of Planet’s customers use the open source platform QGIS to run analyses with diverse sources of geospatial data.

To support these users, Planet also launched a new Planet Plugin for QGIS. Similar to the ArcGIS Pro Add-in, the Planet Plugin for QGIS supports direct integration with PlanetScope, SkySat, Landsat and Sentinel imagery, as well as Planet Basemaps.

We also unveiled updates to our flagship web application Planet Explorer. Customers can discover and view Select Basemaps in Planet Explorer, and view them alongside their PlanetScope or SkySat imagery. Within Explorer, customers can also make use of tools like comparison, swipe and fade and time-series analysis, whether on a quarterly, monthly or weekly basis.

In Planet Explorer, there is a new Band Math feature that enables customers who use Select Surface Reflectance Basemaps to visualize seven different band combinations and indices on-the-fly in Explorer:

• RGB
• Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)
• Color-infrared (CIR)
• Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI)
• Visual Atmosphere Resistance Index (VARI)
• Modified Soil-adjusted Vegetation Index (MSAVI2)
• Modified Triangular Vegetation Index (MTVI2)

What can this be used for? A forestry customer who is interested in understanding vegetation change can use the NDVI index on a monthly Select Surface Reflectance Basemap to quickly locate small disturbances, giving them the opportunity to send their field agents to inspect what’s going on before conditions worsen.

Get guides and tips on how to use our integrations over at the Developer Center, take a spin through Planet Explorer to test new features and reach out to your customer success manager to learn more. Happy holidays!