- March 1, 2023
- Posted by: EARSC
- Categories: EARSC News, Members News
In August, Planet announced its first three certified partners through our new Planet Orbit Certification Program, all of whom have a deep understanding of Planet data and are creating innovative solutions on our platform. These solutions are making it easier for users to process and use Planet data. In the last few months, we have been thrilled to see how our partnerships are enabling impact around the world.
Notably, we are seeing a transformation in sustainable agriculture across Europe. Our partner Sinergise, a leading developer platform for earth observation (EO) data, is powering the European Union-backed Sentinel Hub. This allows customers, developers, and data scientists to access multi-source EO data for processing, analysis, and insight extraction. This platform is helping European nations transform agricultural practices for greater sustainability and find solutions for the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). A recently expanded partnership now allows all Planet customers, developers, and data scientists to leverage Sentinel Hub’s data processing platform to extract insights from Planet data.
Since 2018, the CAP has been working on a modernizing and greening process, aligning with the EU Green Deal to tackle climate change by adopting remote sensing solutions to support agricultural monitoring. Combined with Planet data and public satellite data from the European Space Agency (ESA), Sinergise’s Sentinel Hub enables farmers, businesses, and governments to transform their management practices and report their sustainable impact. These data sources and distribution services allow the government of Slovenia and agricultural companies like Bayer to visualize and analyze a variety of data products at an unprecedented speed.
In Slovenia, agricultural small land parcels present a challenge for monitoring how farmers can align their practices with the EU’s CAP. However, thanks to Sentinel Hub, the Slovenian National Paying Agency has been able to access Planet data for accurate land parcel monitoring. With our data, even small and elongated parcels of agricultural land can be assessed for sustainable management practices, helping Checks and Monitoring reports and providing solutions for the CAP agenda.
With Planet Fusion and SkySat data, Bayer is able to optimize seed production, improve supply chain efficiency, and support sustainable agriculture. With this dataset, their farmers can see the potential to better understand historical and in-season crop performance. Access to Planet data allows Bayer to further expand into the digital agricultural revolution and enhance precision agriculture practices.
This agricultural innovation is also seen in Polish start-up SatAgro, which provides customers access to Planet’s daily imagery, complementary satellite data from NASA and ESA, and information on weather and soil sampling all in one app. This data enables farmers to monitor crop development in near real time, observe the effects of agronomic treatments, and generate productivity benchmarks by observing our imagery archive reaching back over a decade.
Leveraging PlanetScope, SkySat, Planet Fusion, and Sentinel-2, the Welsh government has also sponsored new sustainable agricultural research programs. For example, the Living Wales research project simulates sustainable farming practices to help inform future policy making. This data helps researchers better understand the allocation of carbon within different landscapes and how it is changing and the varying distribution of native flora and fauna.
As you heard from our co-founders in Planet’s North Star, we are striving to build an Earth data platform that powers action, and partnerships are what will allow us to accelerate and escalate this goal. Our partner ecosystem is a family built of experts delivering unique solutions to over a dozen verticals around the entire globe. We look forward to sharing how these efforts are shaping the world for the better as we continue to grow these relationships.
We are also excited to announce that Bayer will be sharing more details about how they are leveraging Planet’s satellite data to revolutionize the agricultural industry at Planet’s Explore 2023 Conference in Washington, D.C. on April 12-13th. Be sure to register today to learn about the latest technologies defining Europe’s sustainability transformation.
