Resource Environmental Solutions (RES) is an ecological restoration firm which provides end-to-end project development for wetland restoration to improve resilience, habitat, and stormwater management objectives. In the 13 years since RES was founded, the firm has restored 58,024 acres of wetlands, among other restoration achievements. Impact at this scale requires monitoring solutions that can keep up.
Resource Environmental Solutions (RES) is an ecological restoration firm which provides end-to-end project development for wetland restoration to improve resilience, habitat, and stormwater management objectives. In the 13 years since RES was founded, the firm has restored 58,024 acres of wetlands, among other restoration achievements. Impact at this scale requires monitoring solutions that can keep up.
Upstream Tech and RES have partnered to explore how Upstream Tech’s Lens product can help RES streamline planning and monitoring steps of the mitigation project lifecycle. Access to satellite data allows RES staff to efficiently evaluate their projects before, during, and after development -- and to use imagery to demonstrate the impact of their work to a range of stakeholders, from project partners to regulators.
Comparison generated in Upstream Tech Lens™️
Pre-restoration image from November 2018 (U.S.D.A. National Agricultural Imagery Program)
Post-restoration image from May 2020 (Satellite imagery © 2020 Maxar Technologies)
Lens makes it easy for mitigation banks, land trusts, conservation organizations, and others to:
As a leader in their field, RES has been proactively exploring and using new technology solutions like Lens to make their operations more efficient. Russell Bzoza, Director of Supply Chain for RES, reflects: “We’re always looking for efficiency gains in our project development process while maintaining high standards and providing value to our clients - and new technologies like this can help us achieve that goal.”
RES is also envisioning the future of their industry -- how to lower the burden of field visits without sacrificing valuable information about on-the-ground conditions. Using Lens to conduct a “virtual field visit” makes this possible. As RES’s Director of Government Affairs, Michael Hare, reflects: “2020 has been a difficult year for everyone as the process of coordinating site visits with regulators has been hampered by the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic. But that challenge has also led us to think creatively: Imagine a future where we could use high resolution satellite data to provide remote updates on projects, track our progress over the course of months or years, and demonstrate the ecological impact of our restoration work.”
We’re proud to be collaborating with RES this year to explore this future vision and to help bring efficiency to their project evaluation, monitoring, and reporting efforts -- all in the name of enabling more and better restoration and conservation work at scale.