Welcome to Lens! We're excited to be working with you. This article serves as a guide to help get you started and references support articles found in our comprehensive Knowledge Base. As you scroll, click on underlined text to navigate to the relevant support article where you can find more details.
Navigate to the Settings menu by clicking on your name, and from there open the Team page. This is where you'll see a button to invite other users to your account. Choose the permission level you'd like each user to have. User settings can always be configured by Admin users from the Team list.
Your properties will live in portfolios in Lens – think of portfolios as folders. After you create a portfolio, you can get started with adding your properties.
Adding properties into Lens is simple: upload a file, draw the boundaries you'd like to add, or select US tax parcels. Check out this support article for information about file types and projection requirements when adding a property by uploading a file.
Before confirming the upload, you’ll see a preview of the area and will be able to edit the property name. After clicking Confirm, the property will be added to the portfolio and we’ll begin processing any publicly available imagery. You'll get an email when everything’s ready.
Open the Order pane to see all of the available high-resolution commercial images for your property. Consider which images meet your seasonal, budget, and resolution needs. The image resolution you'll need greatly depends on what you're hoping to see. Detailed observations such as ATV tracks may require sub-meter imagery, whereas large forestry activity can be observed from lower resolution images. Check out our support doc for more suggestions on choosing the right image to order.
Click on an image to preview it and take a closer look to determine if it will meet your needs. We recommend double checking to make sure there's no cloud cover and that the capture date meets your monitoring needs.
After ordering, an image will take about 15-20 minutes to process and you’ll receive an email when it's ready. You'll find the processed image in the Date dropdown, as well as any publicly available truecolor imagery for your property.
The Lens Library is where you can add data sources that are relevant to your properties and monitoring. We recommend perusing the various datasets and adding any that seem relevant to your portfolios. For example, the Vegetation layer is helpful when monitoring forestry activity, since cleared areas will show a decrease in green color values to correspond with the drop in photosynthetic activity. These observations can be saved as notes for documenting and reporting, and are a great way to add more context to observations made with true-color imagery. Check out this support article for in-depth recommendations of layers to use based on your monitoring goals.
When it comes to detecting changes over time, comparing two images is always better than looking at one. In Lens you can use Compare Mode, which allows you to compare two images side-by-side. Simply click the plus icon at the top of the screen, then choose the dates you’d like to view.
Compare mode enables you to see how an area of interest has changed from one date to another. You can select two dates and drag the slider across the images to see areas where changes might have occurred.
Once you find an area of change or something you'd like to record, you can create a note that will include the relevant location and the imagery you're viewing.
Once you create a note, it will be added to the Notes pane where you'll see observations saved by your colleagues. You can also attach a photo to your note if you have documentation from a field visit to supplement the remote data.
Truecolor imagery is great for monitoring properties at a glance, but satellites collect lots of data that we can't see with our naked eye. With Lens, that data can be synthesized to shed light on ground conditions.
The Analysis tool allows you to easily visualize seasonal patterns and year-over-year changes in ecological conditions. The tool uses high-frequency Sentinel-2 data that comes into Lens every 5 days or so, making it a great way to narrow down the time window of when a particular change has happened. It can be used to evaluate trends in vegetation, water, and any of the other data layers offered in Lens. Be sure to check out the Lens Library to enable specific datasets for your account.
In the video above, Analysis is being used to narrow down the time window of when forestry work occurred. Once that date range is determined, commercial imagery could be ordered to spot equipment and associated impacts.
Ready to export your notes and imagery out of Lens and into a monitoring report? It's as simple as a click of a button. Just click "Create a report" at the top of the Reports pane, which will open up a report builder in a new window. You can customize the text, sequencing of pages, and images displayed. When you're all set, you can export as a PDF, print, or save it back to Lens. See our support article here for more information.
Hop into Lens and start exploring! You can't break anything, so click around and start checking out your areas of interest. If you’re on a Standard plan, you have access to other features like Lookouts, Parcel Data, and more! We encourage you to explore and reach out with any questions.
As questions come up, our Knowledge Base has all of the answers you're looking for. If you aren't finding the answers to your questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us at lens@upstream.tech.
Happy monitoring and welcome to Lens!
