Land Cover and Land Use: Driving Solutions with Planet Data

Sustainably managing land cover and land use is critical to meeting climate, sustainable development and food security goals around the world. Fortunately, advances in Earth observation and geospatial analysis technologies are helping us do just that.

Take agricultural commodities production, for example. In 2012, Global Consumer Goods corporations signed the global New York Declaration on Forests, committing to removing deforestation from commodity supply chains. As governments move towards implementing Paris Agreement commitments, and investors increasingly consider material resource risks, many consumer goods companies are now looking for new solutions to identify, measure and report on deforestation and land use risks in commodities production. This is where advanced Earth observation and analytics technologies can step in.

Planet’s daily, high-resolution, full-Earth satellite imaging supports solutions in:

1. Detecting land cover and land use changes: Complementing traditionally available datasets and alerts with higher spatial and temporal resolutions
2. Validating and classifying land cover and land use conversions: Pulling high-resolution imagery from just before and after an alert to validate and classify any land conversion
3. Correlating changes to supply chain assets: With daily monitoring and very high-resolution tasking, you can correlate geospatial insights with asset-level information.

Planet’s SkySat constellation provides very high-resolution monitoring of key supply chain assets, such as this palm oil mill facility near the site, deforested for increased production. © 2020, Planet Labs Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This is an area in Sumatra, Indonesia where forested land was converted to palm oil production in early 2020. The pink images illustrate where the Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) alerts, powered by Landsat data, indicated a deforestation alert. PlanetScope imagery (in green) complements GLAD with higher spatial and temporal resolutions–improving solutions related to earlier deforestation detection, land use conversion validation and classification and correlation to commodity production, sourcing and supply chain assets. © 2020, Planet Labs Inc. All Rights Reserved.

“Planet’s high-frequency, high-resolution satellite imagery offers an unprecedented dataset for validation and classification of land use change at the needed spatial and temporal resolutions to bring about smarter policy and greater supply chain traceability,” says Jenna Mukuno, senior manager in product marketing at Planet.

Planet believes these global challenges require a deep, multi-pronged approach, and is therefore building an ecosystem of partners to empower governments, NGOs, corporations and investors to accurately measure and report on deforestation and land use risks in commodities production. When combined with public datasets and proprietary data, particularly down to the asset level, Planet and partners can support new measurement and reporting tools.

For more information on using Planet data to advance sustainable economic development, please see here. For more information on how to partner with us in this work, please reach out to Tara O’Shea (tara.oshea@planet.com).