It's been an exciting month for the Lens team - from seeing many of you at the Planet Explore conference to announcing that we've partnered with Apple to support Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification for their recently-expanded Restore Fund.
Whether you're a member of a volunteer-led conservation organization, or a fund manager for Apple, we're committed to supporting you with the best remote sensing tools to inform your conservation decision-making and strategy. Read on to hear about new updates in Lens.
Compare mode is a beloved Lens feature, and we're happy to announce some exciting updates. The first change you'll notice is an updated interface, allowing you to click the "+" to open up a new layer. Now in addition to comparing two layers of the same type, you can compare different layers side-by-side. This flexibility allows you to pick up patterns between truecolor and index layers, even from the same date. See our support article for more details about compare mode.
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We're happy to add a new layer to the Lens Library: The Map of Biodiversity Importance (MoBI) by NatureServe. This layer provides information about the number of species in the continental US that are protected by the Endangered Species Act and/or considered to be in danger of extinction. This dataset is free and available to all Lens customers, and will be displayed beyond the property boundaries to enable you to contextualize your site within a larger area. Curious to learn more? See our modeled dataset support article here.
When you create a new portfolio, you'll have the option to select new layers that can be added to that portfolio, as shown below. To learn more about the layers that you can display overtop your new properties, check out your Lens Library or see our support article here.
You can now filter available images by resolution in the date dropdown. This is handy for seeing your sub-meter images at a glance. Remember that you can filter commercial images by source in the Order pane, too.
We hope to see you at the National Mitigation & Environmental Markets Conference from May 8-11th in Jacksonville, FL. Upstream's Clay Word is giving a virtual talk called "The View from Above — Leveraging Remote Data for Mitigation Project Success" and he's also on a panel presentation titled "Wetland Science and Technology: Tools for Economic and Workflow Efficiency" on May 10th.
Check out our new blog post outlining how Lens can be used to identify potential areas for restoration projects. Clay, our restoration ecologist on staff, has some great words of advice to help you use Lens for assessing conservation potential.
We've had the pleasure of partnering with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). Read our blog post on how we provided monitoring services to support ECCC's goal of determining the long-term impact in conserving the ecological values of the properties. Interested in our monitoring services? Reach out to us at lens@upstream.tech!
Do you want to check if an area of a Sentinel-2 Vegetation image is shaded or has a drop in vegetation? Open up flexible compare mode and view the truecolor version of the same image, side-by-side. As seen below, the northern hillsides appear to have been cleared but are instead shaded from the sun. Entering 3D mode would add more context about shadows, too.
Check out the rest of our knowledge base to learn more about working in Lens and know that you can always reach us at lens@upstream.tech with any questions. Happy Monitoring!
