Image above: PlanetScope image of manure spread over snow in Easton, Wisconsin taken February 7, 2022. © 2022, Planet Labs PBC. All Rights Reserved. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), also known as industrial-scale factory farms, raise large amounts of livestock in small confined spaces. As a consequence, these environments also generate a […]
Image above: PlanetScope image of snowcapped Upper Gunnison Mountains, Colorado taken December 4, 2021. © 2021, Planet Labs PBC. All Rights Reserved. Alpine regions are some of the most sensitive systems to climate change. In the mountainous ecosystems of the western United States, for example, even small changes in temperature cause significant […]
Due to the devastating impacts of COVID-19, citizens around the world are now familiar with the global health challenges caused by virus spillover events – when a pathogen travels from one host species to another such as a bat to a human. As human populations continue to grow and move into wildlife […]
Illegal sand mining is running rampant in the world due to the need for river sand as a binder in making concrete. Desert sand isn’t suitable for this purpose due to its shape. This illegal activity had led to the deaths of journalists, farmers, miners, and more, as well as causing ecological […]
Past studies have explored the use of flowing ice debris to estimate stream velocity with Planet data. However, tropical rivers pose a distinct challenge, due to high cloud cover and turbidity. Adriano Junqueira, of São Paulo State University, led a team to deploy a novel approach in the Araguaia River watershed in […]
A team of researchers led by Professor Jin Wu, at the University of Hong Kong, has been studying tropical and temperate forest phenology—the rhythms and periods of life. Aided by the high revisit rate of Dove satellites, Jing Wang and team detected dry season vegetation patterns in the Amazon: many tropical trees […]
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, humanity noted several effects of lockdowns on the Earth system from orbit, including vacant highways, and reductions in air pollution. People affected in Venice reported that the local waters were clearer than they had been in decades. Milad Niroumand-Jadidi and colleagues at the University of Trento and […]
Improving crop yields, vigor and health, can be facilitated by better monitoring of the cross-sectional area of vegetation—i.e., Leaf Area Index or LAI. However, measuring LAI on the ground is time consuming and expensive. Sentinel-2, operated by the European Space Agency, publishes a global LAI product; but at 10m resolution and a […]
Glacial lakes in mountainous regions are prone to outburst floods that can devastate entire communities. With climate change, glacial ice is thinning and retreating in the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Himalaya region, posing an increasing threat to human life and requiring improved monitoring. Nida Qayyum, in the Department of Space Science at […]
On a rapidly changing Earth, space-based imaging provides one of the most critical inputs to our scientific understanding of the whole Earth system. With the rapid increase in the number of medium- to high-resolution imaging sensors, there is increasing need for standard calibration methodology. An increase in sensor fusion, in which researchers […]
