July 6th, 2023
AI-Powered Impact Observatory Announces Partnership with Planet to Deliver Near Real-Time Change Monitoring with Best-in-Market Accuracy, Frequency and Resolution

Collaboration leverages PlanetScope Imagery Data to help customers better understand our changing world and make critical decisions faster

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Impact Observatory, a leader in AI-powered global mapping and monitoring, today announced it has entered into a partnership with Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a leading provider of daily data and insights about the world. The partnership  uses AI-powered analytics to monitor land cover and land use (LULC) on top of Planet’s high-frequency, medium-and high-resolution satellite data. Automated analytics are core to helping customers better understand changes and anticipate threats at previously unobtainable speed and scale.

“The world is changing rapidly. Every day, cities develop, crops are grown, forests are managed, and yet unsustainable resource usage and natural disasters put the whole system at risk. This greatly impacts society’s choices about the infrastructure, food systems, water supplies, and natural resources that we all depend on,” said Steve Brumby, Co-founder and CEO of Impact Observatory.

With this partnership, customers experience high quality space-based global mapping and monitoring benefits, when compared to existing public satellite imagery solutions, including:

• 10x increase in spatial resolution: PlanetScope’s 3.5m spatial resolution enables customers to classify features in built areas such as roads, buildings, small areas of vegetation, and small bodies of water.
• 5x increase in temporal resolution: PlanetScope’s daily, global revisit allows us to see the temporary features of our living world, such as small, seasonal bodies of water and flood water that aren’t visible in weekly imagery available from public satellite data. It also allows us to monitor changes more quickly and at earlier stages, such as forest losses due to wildfire, impacts of flooding, start of new construction, and damage due to conflict.
• Annual and seasonal classification: Classify 15+ land-cover categories, both annually and seasonally, create maps up to today, create metrics, and identify areas of change.

Impact Observatory’s IO Monitor service enables government leaders to monitor the entire world in near real-time without relying solely on national assets. Leaders in governments, NGOs, finance and industry need trustworthy, actionable information about the changing world to understand opportunities, identify threats, and measure the impacts of actions. IO Monitor coupled with PlanetScope imagery meets this need with timely, up-to-date maps at previously unobtainable scale.

Impact Observatory turns millions of satellite images into maps that label every pixel into one of nine categories of major LULC. Since the release of their first global map in June 2021, Impact Observatory has received over 1,000,000 visitors accessing and downloading our annual maps via Esri Living Atlas, Microsoft Planetary Computer, and the AWS Registry of Open Data.

To learn more about Impact Observatory’s maps on-demand, please visit the IO Monitor site here. For additional information on large-scale discounts, contact Impact Observatory’s sales team at [email protected].

About Impact Observatory

Impact Observatory is a mission-driven technology company bringing artificial intelligence (AI) powered algorithms and on-demand data to sustainability and environmental risk analysis for governments, non-profit organizations, companies, and markets. Founded in 2020 in Washington, DC, Impact Observatory’s goal is to empower global decision-makers to be planetary superheroes, with the timely, actionable science-based insights they need to succeed. Visit us at impactobservatory.com.