TerraPulse, Inc., the green technology startup that introduced the world’s first high-resolution satellite map of global tree canopy cover in 2013, today announced the company has again broken the record for resolution in global mapping.
The company’s terraView land-monitoring platform will now host tree canopy, deforestation, and other forest-monitoring indices at 10-meter spatial resolution from 2017 to present, allowing detection and monitoring of forest change globally at the highest spatial and temporal resolution possible to date.
Applying terraPulse’s artificial intelligence (AI) to the European Space Agency’s publicly available global archive of satellite images, the technology allows measurement and monitoring of natural assets from the entire globe down to individual forest stands. The unprecedented detail enables landowners, foresters, and investors to participate in emerging carbon and biodiversity markets by providing intelligence on the state and changes of what is increasingly becoming known as “natural capital.”
“With climate and land-use change posing growing existential threats to biodiversity, monitoring the global biosphere is more important than ever,” says Joseph Sexton, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of terraPulse. “Detecting forest activity at 9 times the previous scale will overcome a major obstacle to sustainable development and accelerate the resilience of rural economies to global change.”
Sexton describes terraPulse as a “Bloomberg terminal for the biosphere.” The platform’s new set of global indices enables:
- Detection of deforestation and forest degradation
- Quantification of carbon stocks and changes
- Prediction of fire risk
- Analysis of biodiversity habitat and wildlife movement
Min Feng, terraPulse’s Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, described the achievement as two major milestones: “This sets the new standard in spatial scale, and combined with terraPulse’s entire historical record, it is the only map series spanning nearly four decades of forest change.”
