We’re uniting Airbus Foundation’s donated satellite imagery, with insights from our conservation field partners to explore the value of high-resolution satellite imagery for multiple conservation purposes including: Surveying cross-border areas without requiring multiple national civil aviation permissions.Ĭonservation use cases for terrestrial protected area management.Being unobtrusive, it requires no human presence, eliminating the risk of disturbing surveyed species and habitats.This eliminates species miscounts that can happen when surveys are done by a human in an aeroplane who might go over the same area, or when objects of interest move from one transect (a natural feature or section of earth where observations are made or measurements taken for conservation monitoring) to another. For example, a new colony of 1.5 million Adélie penguins, which stayed hidden for nearly 3,000 years, was detected in a pan-Antarctic survey that investigated every single cloud-free satellite image of the southern continent. Collecting information that is typically inaccessible to scientists.For example, satellite images revealed that the Earth lost 4,000 km2 of its tidal wetlands over the past 20 years.

Surveying large spaces in short periods, repeatedly.For example, satellites and AI can detect plastic waste sites as small as 5 by 5 metres, creating an interactive “living” map of plastic pollution in near real-time. Allowing information to be collected in repeatable and standardized ways over time.The benefits of monitoring ecosystems and species from space are vast including: This ranges from the rapid detection of deforestation to mining, locating wildlife colonies and other illegal activities causing negative changes to the landscape. Satellite imagery is already enabling ecologists and conservationists to supplement and, in some use cases, even supplant traditional conservation research methods. By allowing scientists and practitioners to take an inventory of Earth’s surface and measure changes, we can now understand ecosystem dynamics at a level of detail like never before.

Satellite imagery is transforming conservation. Unlocking the power of satellite imagery for nature conservation

Free real time satellite images