Planet partnership to provide daily satellite imagery

Having introduced the use of the Planet Satellite Imagery to the forestry sector in 2017, Interpine has announced that they have extended their capability by partnering with Planet to offer support and ease of access to high-frequency, high-resolution satellite imagery.

Interpine and Planet have established a partnership allowing forest owners and land managers to have a New Zealand industry-specific point of contact to access and leverage Planet’s extensive global daily satellite imagery service. Planet provides capabilities and content that enable Interpine to build a new range of solutions across forestry and land-use management.

“Very early on we recognised the daily imagery product Planet was offering was a game-changer for forest operational management and wanted to ensure New Zealand forestry companies were at the forefront of the spatial and temporal resolution this technology offers” said David Herries, Interpine’s Director / GM.

Forestry companies are already realising the benefit of 4-band (R,G,B,NiR), daily imagery for operations like cutover and windthrow mapping, where clipped imagery can be brought straight into their Forest Management and GIS systems (such as ESRI ArcGIS and GeoMaster). This significantly reduces harvest coordinator involvement, provides improved health and safety and increased reliability in the process.

The introduction of 50cm resolution SkySat imagery further opens the door of an array of applications including finalising plantable areas and stand remapping/stock changes.

“Planet is thrilled to have Interpine as a partner and is looking forward to helping them in their mission to shape today’s forests with the technology of tomorrow. Together, we are well suited to enable forestry organizations across the ANZ region to leverage high cadence satellite imagery to scale their businesses” said Simon Campbell, Director of Asia Pacific Channel Partnerships, Planet.

A recent case study looked at how Interpine implemented Automated harvest cutover mapping with satellite imagery at Pan Pac Forests in Hawke’s Bay NZ. Led by consultation from Interpine, Pan Pac automated the collection and reporting on clearfell areas by using high frequency, 3.7 meter PlanetScope imagery. This resulted in significant time and cost savings for their team, streamlined workflows for end of month and year-end reporting, and improved data accuracy. Click here to download the full case study.

Interpine together with Planet provided an Innovative Approach to a Long-Standing Problem. Using PlanetScope imagery for cutover mapping, Interpine helped Pan Pac bring fresh, data-driven approaches to their forest division. This resulted in;

• Significant Time Savings: Significant time was saved by the harvest coordinators that could be utilized for more productive task. The overall collection of data, analysis, and reporting timeline was reduced from 1 week to 1 day.
• Higher Accuracy Monthly and Year-End Inventory Reports: 5% reduction in error.
• Cost Savings: Affordable, scalable solution when compared to UAV and aerial photography.
• Greater Contextual Information: For example, assessing storm and wildfire impacts.

“Pan Pac has found Planet to be an absolute game-changer in the way we do things. It has been beneficial for health and safety of staff as well as the use of staff time. It will be even better once we can access the SkySat (50 cm imagery) more freely” said Sue Stone, GIS Technician, Pan Pac.

Currently the ForestTECH 2020 programme is being designed with industry. It is being run on 18-19 November but in a slightly different format this year. Two half day workshops are also being set up to run in Rotorua, New Zealand. Early details can be found on the event website. Further information will be supplied in the next few weeks.

As part of the ForestTECH 2020 event this year, Tara O’Shea, Director of Forest Programs for Planet, USA will be presenting on combining remote sensing and analytics technologies for operational deployment in forestry operations.

Source: Interpine