Road construction often precedes harmful activities like mining, drilling, logging, and poaching. And so detecting new road construction is one of the holy grails of conservation. This blog post describes how SkyTruth interns adapted previous SkyTruth work on oil and gas drilling sites to detecting roads.
A court in Australia finally ordered the company responsible for one of Australia’s worst oil spills to compensate Indonesian seaweed farmers harmed by that disaster, thanks in part to WWF-Australia using guidance from SkyTruth.
With SkyTruth data, watershed managers can track vegetation trends through time. And with our soon to be released Issue Map, they can explore how those trends vary spatially across a watershed.
SkyTruth just wrapped up the first year of a project to map vegetation trends along the Colorado River, so it seems like a good time to share some of the exciting progress we’ve made so far.
In early 2019 SkyTruth announced Conservation Vision, our initiative to use machine learning to automate the analysis of the ever-growing archives of satellite imagery. These days it encompasses most, if not all, of our data science team’s work. At year’s end, SkyTruth Technical Program Director shares more about these tools and their potential impacts — along with a few other exciting developments from 2020. Please consider a donation to help us continue this work in 2021.