In remote parts of the world or where political conflicts reduce access to protected areas, researchers and conservationists need solutions to monitor activities that threaten wildlife and ecosystems.
The Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS), an international conservation organization founded in 1858, focuses on maintaining biodiversity and conserving wildlife and ecosystems in protected areas and exceptional wilderness locations. To achieve these goals, the FZS must demonstrate the presence of threatening activity to local law enforcement and protected area agencies so that they can take action.
“We need to protect pristine natural areas,” says Manuel Engelbauer, FZS’s South American program manager. “All the crises we try to address come together in one overarching goal – to protect pristine areas of nature and biodiversity around the world.”
But monitoring activities in protected areas – especially unauthorized activities such as gold mining, logging and poaching – has required expensive and time-consuming tools, such as overflights and expeditions. ‘field investigation. At the same time, nature conservation agencies face budget and staffing challenges as the COVID-19 pandemic impacts government revenue and donation drives, further limiting oversight.
With the growing need for high resolution frequency, FZS turned to Planet. From Engelbauer’s perspective, Planet has three advantages for FZS:
Ease of use. In many protected areas supported by FZS, there are no GIS specialists to support conservation teams. “Planet is as easy to use as Google Maps,” Engelbauer tells the teams. “They can visualize the area very quickly and make decisions about what to do with that information.”
Data scope. FZS relies on constantly changing data to detect changes over time. “Often, teams used images from open access sources, but they never knew how old the data was, especially images for remote areas,” says Engelbauer. “With Planet, we know the images are current.”
Trust the data. FZS conservationists must share reliable, reliable and time-stamped data with local agencies and law enforcement to carry out actions in protected areas. “Being able to tell an agency, ‘That was the situation on the ground on that particular date,’ helped us a lot,” says Engelbauer.
With Planet’s network of SkySats, FZS can identify “hot spots” that should be investigated further, locate potential illegal activity, and monitor changes over time.
“Thanks to our investments in Planet, we now have much more information about protected areas, compared to the time and money spent on overflights,” says Engelbauer. “Information and time are our currency – they are invaluable to us. We can show that action is needed without the delays that would cause incalculable damage to our protected areas.
Read the full case study here to find out how FZS monitors activity in the regions of the world.
Planet is a public benefit corporation (PBC), listed on the New York Stock Exchange as PL, in which its mission is encoded in its corporate DNA, requiring Planet’s directors to remain true to their mission in as part of their fiduciary duty to their shareholders. Planet’s public interest goal is: “To accelerate humanity towards a more sustainable, secure and prosperous world by illuminating environmental and social change.” »
