AUTHOR PROFILE Andres Castillo
Curious Planeteer working to make the Earth's changes visible, accessible and actionable.

BITS Joins Planet Labs as Alliance Partner in Mexico

News

Planet Labs is thrilled to announce our latest Alliance Partner Bufete de Ingeniería en Telecomunicaciones y Sistemas, or BITS, as it’s commonly known. BITS is based in Mexico and has more than 20 years of experience in the remote sensing and geospatial markets.

Mexico-city-square

Colorful tianguis, or street markets, stretch down Mexico City’s wide boulevards. Image ©2016 Planet Labs, Inc. cc-by-sa 4.0.

 

As a valued partner, BITS becomes a distributor of Planet Labs’ products and services in Mexico, including both our PlanetScope and RapidEye data. BITS will also be able to access NASA’s open source Landsat data from Planet Labs’ online imagery platform.
In Mexico, BITS has served projects in environmental management, agriculture monitoring, water resource management, risk and emergency assessment, and national security. Many of these projects have been jointly developed with academic and research institutions.

Hector Betancourt, BITS CEO, shared the following quote:
“With this agreement, we are not only confirming our commitment with the supply of geospatial information to the Mexican government agencies, we are also starting a new way to access relevant and on time information to support the right decision making process. Our main objectives are to help with the economic development of Mexico, protect our environmental resources, and preserve the life of our fellow citizens at risk of natural disasters that threaten Mexico every year.”

Among various applications, BITS seeks to provide imagery to the Government of Mexico to create land use coverage maps for use in reporting to the Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) international conservation program. Planet Labs and the RapidEye satellites have provided imagery to government officials in Mexico since 2011, which was recently covered in Earth Imaging Journal.

You can learn more about our monitoring programs here and learn more about BITS by visiting https://gpo-bits.com.mx/.