We're thrilled to have seen so many of you at the Land Trust Alliance Rally conference last week. It’s inspiring to hear about the incredible conservation work you’re doing. We’re excited to share a few updates from the past month:
Jake, Miles, and Maya in Portland at LTA Rally. Attend Jake's "Lens for Land Trusts" webinar on Sept. 19th by RSVPing here.
Building off of last month's release of the Lens Share Link, Lens maps can now be embedded on your webpage. This allows you to embed an interactive Lens pane directly into existing websites and articles, as seen in our support article here.
When you save a note that includes a modeled dataset layer, the legend will now be included beneath the note images in the report. And when viewing a modeled dataset, the legend will now appear on your map screen instead of in the details pane. To learn more about our modeled dataset layers, see our article here.
All new image purchases in Lens will process at a higher quality than ever before, thanks to system improvements from our engineers. Truecolor imagery in Lens uses linear resampling to display smoother images, whereas index layers (like NDVI) will use nearest resampling for a more precise and pixelated display.
As you may have noticed, our Analyze Area tool has a new home on the left sidebar. This lays the groundwork for more Analyze Area updates to come.
You can now save Analyze Area bar charts from modeled dataset layers as notes. These are handy for visualizing and quantifying changes in various landcover types over time. To learn more about our modeled dataset layers, see our article here.
When viewing the Analyze Area graph of a modeled dataset, you can click individual categories to turn them on or off. This is handy for honing in on particular categories, such as trees and crops in the example below.
We identified an edge case where Analyze Area contained an error impacting the accuracy of its plots for Sentinel-2. We’ve recently shipped an update addressing this, and have verified Analyze Area accuracy going forward. For any organizations that have a note saved with an Analyze Area chart that were affected by this error, we’ve emailed you directly. To learn more about Analyze Area, see our article here.
When generating reports, photos attached to notes will now generate on a subsequent "Attachments" page immediately following the note. Photos now have more space and can be viewed easier, and up to three photos can be attached to a single note. Attached photos are handy for documenting field visits or adding context to an observation. To read more about creating notes, see our article.
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Plus and Enterprise customers
In addition to the free Impact Observatory Landcover dataset, we now offer a premium version with more classifications and the most recent data. Impact Observatory's innovative AI-powered methods categorize land cover into 14 classes, and this custom data can be requested directly through Lens. The data costs $.02/acre, with a minimum spend of $500. The data will include the time period requested and one year prior for baseline comparison. To initiate a data request, head over to your Layers Library where you can click "Request" on the Custom Landcover tile. To learn more about custom landcover data, see our article here.
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Interested in Lens Plus? Now's a great time to upgrade while we're running a $500 discount on Lens Plus. Lens Plus includes vegetation drop alerts, parcel ownership data, parcel owner alerts, streaming of commercial imagery into GIS, and more. See our article about Plus here. Curious to learn more? Reach out to us at lens@upstream.tech.
Remote monitoring with Lens helps small teams save time and money. Over 200 organizations use Lens to collectively monitor over 55 million acres. With Lens’ built-in notes, analysis, and reporting features—all designed with Land Trust Standards & Practices in mind—you’ll see how anyone on your team can quickly start using satellite and aerial imagery to meet monitoring needs.
Join Jake Faber on Tuesday, September 19th for a deep dive into remote monitoring workflows and Q&A about Lens. RSVP here.
For those of you working outside of the tropics, you may be curious to see the Planet NICFI imagery that we've mentioned. This 4.77m cloud-free monthly imagery is freely available to organizations working in the tropics via PlanetScope and Norway's International Climate and Forests Initiative. Check out the imagery here to see an illegal gold mine in Cameroon.
Imagery credit: Planet NICFI 2016 and 2023
Want to change your units from acres to hectares? Simply navigate to your name in the top right corner > Settings > Organization. From here you can change the default units for your organization.
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!
Miles & the Lens Team
