Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has caused extensive damage to forests, particularly in eastern and southern regions with sustained combat, where field shelterbelts have often been used as cover and subsequently heavily destroyed. This study presents a systematic region-scale assessment of pre-war shelterbelt area and war-related loss between 2021 and 2025 using 3 m PlanetScope imagery and deep learning. We evaluated three input datasets—monthly PlanetScope RGB mosaics, multiseasonal PlanetScope RGB stacks, and surface reflectance (SR) PlanetScope imagery—in combination with two semantic segmentation architectures: a convolutional U-Net with a ResNet-34 encoder and a transformer-based SegFormer with a MiT-B0 backbone. Across all input configurations, the U-Net consistently outperformed SegFormer, achieving the highest F1 scores. Monthly RGB mosaics delivered accuracy comparable to more complex multiseasonal and SR inputs in pixel-based evaluation and are a cost-efficient option for mapping narrow shelterbelts. The RGB-based model trained on July 2021 mosaics reached an F1 score of 0.71 and retained values of 0.58–0.67 for other months of the same leaf-on season. Temporal transfer to 2025 resulted in lower but still reasonable performance with F1 scores of 0.53–0.63. Error-adjusted mapping estimated the shelterbelt area in 2021 at 254 ± 14.5 thousand ha, equivalent to a mean density of 2.6 ha km−2. By 2025, this area had been reduced by approximately 41 thousand ha, or 16% of the pre-war area. Losses were strongly concentrated along frontlines where local losses exceeded 1.5 ha km−2 compared to an average loss of 0.5 ha km−2 across the entire study area. The resulting maps complement the existing forest monitoring framework in Ukraine and provide a spatially explicit basis for prioritizing post-war remediation and assessing losses in protective functions and carbon accumulation.

Planet (PL) subsidiary Sinergise Solutions has been selected by the European Space Agency to build Slovenia’s Space Resilience Node.The 12-month pilot, developed with software company Lucis, will prototype automated links between wide-area satellite change detection and high-resolution imaging requests for Slovenia’s civil protection and disaster relief administration. The planned system will analyze Copernicus data and PlanetScope imagery, triggering alerts and imaging requests, including through Planet’s Pelican fleet, when preset thresholds or anomalies are detected. Its initial focus is demonstrating wildfire-management workflows across Slovenia’s 20,000 square kilometers.

Prescribed burns reduce giant sequoia mortality by 77% during extreme wildfire events, according to a study from the University of California, Davis, published in Nature Communications. Researchers analyzed 26,400 trees across 19 groves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. The study focused on areas hit by the Castle Fire (2020) and the KNP Complex Fire (2021). By integrating airborne lidar data with PlanetScope satellite imagery, the team mapped the volume of surface fuels-dry brush and undergrowth-prior to the blazes and correlated this with tree death tolls. The data shows that sequoias in zones treated with prescribed fire over the previous decade were four times more likely to survive than those in untreated areas. This intervention saved approximately 1,900 trees. Predictive modeling suggests that if these treatments had been applied to all groves, an additional 3,900 sequoias would have survived.

SAN FRANCISCO – Planet’s second Tanager hyperspectral satellite and 18 SuperDoves have arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base for launch no earlier than October on the SpaceX Transporter-18 rideshare. The SuperDoves contribute to Planet’s daily Earth imagery. Paired with artificial intelligence, PlanetScope detects change in broad areas, which is “core to unlocking new markets,” Planet CEO Will Marshall said in a…

Planet Labs (NYSE: PL) reported that its Tanager-2 hyperspectral satellite and 18 SuperDove satellites from Flock 4J have arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California for launch on the upcoming SpaceX Transporter-18 rideshare mission.According to Planet, Tanager-2 is designed to double the company’s hyperspectral capacity and halve revisit times for detecting methane super-emitters and other targets as part of its project with Carbon Mapper. The mission will augment Planet’s PlanetScope daily global monitoring, support expanding hyperspectral data offerings, and enable potential applications in climate, environmental, agricultural and infrastructure monitoring.

An interactive map of ~1.8 million individual tree crowns in New York City, classified by genus from PlanetScope satellite imagery and airborne lidar.

Glacioloog toont met satellietbeelden hoe ramp in Nepal ontstond. Bekijk de video op VRT NWS: nieuws.

2026年ネパール洪水の発生源と思われる箇所を，PlanetScope + Landsat衛星画像をもとに特定しました。 氷河が広範囲で崩壊し，土壌が剥き出しになっています。ここから洪水が発生したものと思われます。 (28.2877, 85.52723)