Satellite firm Planet’s ‘biodiversity subscription’ aims to make tech accessible

Marcos Terán has worked in and around the Matos River in Bolivia for years, collecting data and collaborating with local communities as part of his organization’s conservation initiatives. Designated a Ramsar site because of its importance as a wetland habitat, the Matos is a mosaic of wetlands, forests and pastures, making it a complex ecosystem to study and monitor. Oftentimes, high-resolution data can be hard to come by, particularly for the non-forest parts of the region.

“The dynamics to conserve this complex landscape are very complicated,” Terán, executive director of nonprofit Conservación Amazónica–ACEAA, told Mongabay in a video interview. “Data and maps of deforestation in the Amazon Basin usually only emphasize the changes in the forest. Changes in savannas and wetlands are often not detected.”

Since October, however, the organization has had access to data that have helped them fill those gaps. High-resolution satellite imagery is now helping Conservación Amazónica create a baseline map to characterize and monitor wetland health, monitor agriculture-driven deforestation, and keep a check on their sustainable cattle-grazing initiative.

“We can now get data on the interaction between grassland and forests and information about carbon at this ecotone transition,” Terán said. “We are also looking forward to analyzing the data on humidity and temperature of the land surface because it is very difficult to get that data for grasslands and wetland.”

Conservación Amazónica is among eight organizations around the world now getting these data as part of a new initiative launched by Earth-imaging company Planet. As part of the first phase of Project Centinela, organizations working to protect biodiversity hotspots in places like Costa Rica, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal and Indonesia have been given access to high-resolution, high-frequency satellite data along with analysis tools. The ecosystems they work in include tropical forests, savannas, wetlands and aquatic ecosystems.

“There are lots of places we’re losing before we are even able to describe them or support the people who have long stewarded them,” Amy Rosenthal, senior global director for conservation initiatives at Planet, told Mongabay in a video interview. “With Project Centinela, our aim is to put the highest tech and the best available data where conservation activity and monitoring efforts are ongoing.”

Tapping into data gathered by its vast constellation of satellites, Planet launched Project Centinela to give what it calls a “biodiversity subscription” to 50 organizations. Each of these organizations will have three years of access to high-resolution satellite images, base maps, data on forest carbon, land surface temperatures, soil water content, crop biomass, as well as analysis tools to detect roads and other changes. Nonprofit organizations, universities, startups and Indigenous federations can apply to get access to the subscription. To be eligible, applicants should have experience with remote sensing and should also have a long-term stake in the region.

“With our partners, we can look at different questions and problems from looking at the protection of homeland territories to the characterization of wetland integrity to tracking deforestation around the borders of a park and the presence of threatened and endangered species,” Rosenthal said. “Our partners are also working to combine remote sensing with other on-site sensors such as acoustic recorders, camera traps, as well as with DNA barcoding.”

For example, at the Gunung Naning Protection Forest in Indonesian Borneo, Planet’s data is being used by non-profit organizations Planet Indonesia and Wildmon to help local communities combine satellite-derived data with camera-trap images and acoustic recordings to track and monitor the presence and abundance of species.

In Costa Rica, the nonprofit Osa Conservation will use its access to the data to help create a climate-resilient landscape on the Osa Peninsula, believed to harbor 2.5% of all the terrestrial biodiversity in the world. The data from Planet will help it zoom in on the ecosystem to make better-informed decisions.

“A lot of research that comes out on remote sensing of biodiversity, they’re often global in scale,” Chris Beirne, director of wildlife programs at Osa Conservation, told Mongabay in a video interview. “What that means is that the area in which we work is one pixel in a massive map, and there’s not a huge amount of locally actionable information that’s filtering through to our locations.”

Beirne said his team will extensively use images derived from the high-resolution satellites to monitor and keep track of terrestrial and mangrove restoration activities. He also said the data on where new roads are appearing would be a game changer for his team as they plan for connectivity corridors for animals within the landscape. “If we want to connect point A to B, we can look at how many roads an animal will have to cross,” he said. “And if it’s a lot, we can then think about the restoration techniques we have to go in and do to improve connectivity.”

Over the course of the next few years, Project Centinela will open up applications for more organizations around the world. Rosenthal said the team at Planet intends to closely evaluate how the program is faring, with an eye on the impact it has had on the ground.

“Conservation doesn’t happen overnight, but we would like to see how we’re contributing to the 2030 targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework,” she said. “Our hope is that this produces more biodiversity understanding and better use of space technologies for conservation and community engagement.”

Banner image: Osa Conservation, a non-profit working in the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, aims to use the data obtained as part of Project Centinela to plan and create wildlife connectivity corridors. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Abhishyant Kidangoor is a staff writer at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @AbhishyantPK.

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