Planet Basemaps is our solution for providing comprehensive, high-frequency, visually stunning, and analysis-ready mosaics. For years, we have referred to them as both basemaps and mosaics. However, these two terms actually have slightly different meanings.

A basemap typically refers to a visual backdrop for maps, apps, and analysis.

A mosaic, in the geospatial sense, refers to a collection of raster datasets that have been stitched together into a single larger dataset. While also an effective visual backdrop, mosaics can also be used for raster and geospatial analysis and can power AI and machine learning workflows.

Our solution supports all these workflows. So to provide better clarity, we have renamed Planet Basemaps to Planet Mosaics.

Introducing Planet Mosaics

Planet Mosaics enables our customers to make faster, higher-confidence decisions across entire regions. It provides frequently updated imagery that can be used for monitoring, change detection, and analytics at scale. Mosaics provide a uniform visual and spectral foundation for both human viewing and quantitative analysis workflows like automated AI and machine learning.

More Than a Visual Solution

Planet Mosaics is an analysis-ready tool built with scientifically sound data. It delivers the best PlanetScope® imagery to support visual and automated analysis. Mosaics is fully integrated into Planet Insights Platform with seamless API and application access.

Planet Mosaics offers Visual Mosaics, Normalized Surface Reflectance Mosaics, Global Mosaics, and Custom Mosaics to support a wide variety of workflows.

• Planet Visual Mosaics provides color-corrected imagery with minimal cloud cover, haze, and topographical variations; and are ideal for human view and computer vision analytics.
• Planet Normalized Surface Reflectance Mosaics provides four or eight spectral bands for spectral, quantitative, and time-series analysis.
• The Planet Global Mosaic enhances maps and applications with our most comprehensive and seamless mosaic of the Earth’s landmass.
• Build Custom Mosaics to your own standards by defining band combinations, image processing, map projection, and more.

Uniform Analysis Across Broad Areas

Planet Mosaics feature uniform and seamless mosaics to deliver consistent data critical for quantitative and machine learning workflows across broad areas. We build our mosaics using our 3 m global PlanetScope satellite imagery and they are prepared using our streamlined pipeline and uniform image processing workflows. This system leads to more accurate, reliable analysis over time and space.

Leverage Global Near-Daily Imagery

Planet Mosaics enable customers to avoid costly errors that can occur from obsolete or incomplete data by leveraging frequently updated mosaics that cover entire areas of interest. By utilizing our near-daily PlanetScope imagery, we can deliver mosaics as frequently as weekly. This provides current, reliable, and consistent information to support critical time-series analysis and operational intelligence.

For example, the Forest Management Institute (FMI) in the Czech Republic used Normalized Surface Reflectance Mosaics to identify and monitor bark beetle damage in more than 150,000 hectares of forest and estimated to be €2.4 billion in damage. (These numbers have been updated since the publication of the blog linked above).

Interested in Learning More?

With current, technically consistent, and analysis-ready Planet Mosaics you can reduce uncertainty and accelerate time to insight. Visit our website to learn more about how Planet Mosaics can enhance your visual and analytical workflows.