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Planet Celebrates One Year of the NICFI Satellite Data Program, Providing High-Resolution Data for Tropical Forest ManagementPlanet, a leading provider of daily data and insights about earth, is celebrating one year of the NICFI Satellite Data Program, a partnership with Norway's International Climate and Forests Initiative (NICFI), Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT), and Airbus to advance scientific discovery and support sustainable management of global tropical forests. Participants in the NICFI Satellite Data Program are putting Planet data to work to help reduce and reverse tropical forest loss through government action, private sector adoption, and NGO coordination. In September 2020, the Norwegian Ministry of Climate and Environment awarded KSAT the first ever global contract to combat deforestation. Since then, it has worked with Planet and Airbus to provide comprehensive access to high-resolution satellite monitoring of the tropics to help reduce tropical deforestation and combat climate change. Over the last year, the NICFI Satellite Data Program has registered over 9,000 users from 130 countries around the world. The Planet (News - Alert) Tropical Basemaps account for ove two-thirds of the Basemap selections on Global Forest Watch, a figure that is growing by 25% each quarter. Over 15 million tiles of the Planet Tropical Basemaps have been streamed from the Planet platform, and 70% of surveyed NICFI users said the NICFI Data is now their primary imagery source. The Program has established working relationships with a number of key partners across its three levels of access. These include Purpose Allies, which bring Visual Basemaps to local and global communities, the Platform and Tool Partners, which enable technical workflows on the Analysis-Ready Basemaps, and the General Partners, which apply the Scenes-level data. This past quarter, the NICFI Satellite Data Program launched a number of new, consequential partnerships including a new partnership with Google Earth Engine, which made the NICFI-Planet Tropical Basemaps available in Google (News - Alert) Earth Engine's compute platform for analysis. Users can access the data directly in their GEE catalogue, with no need to store or move data. Within the first month of the solution, over 1,100 NICFI users began to analyze the Tropical Basemaps within Google Earth Engine. The NICFI Satellite Data Program also announced new partnerships to enable visual and story-telling use cases. Mapbox released a suite of demo tools aimed at helping NICFI users more readily translate the high-resolution data into visual story-telling tools. These include providing users with templates to display Planet-NICFI Basemaps on an interactive Mapbox webmap, enabling them to select from multiple time periods to compare change over time, and allowing them to create a swipe interaction to display two sets of Planet-NICFI imagery side-by-side for easy comparison. The Program Team also hosted a training webinar to help journalists use the data for environmental reporting in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. To date, the NICFI Satellite Data Program has gathered over 300 user stories. This quarter many users shared their stories at Planet Explore, Planet's annual user conference:
In year two of the program, Planet looks forward to seeing how partners and users continue to innovate on how to leverage high-resolution satellite monitoring to reduce and reverse tropical forest loss and combat climate change.
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