How we see your trees from space
No private satellite. No secret formula. We use free Sentinel satellite imagery that anyone can download, and we read it every few days, for every plantation you have.
Two satellites, doing two different jobs
Both are run by the European Space Agency under a programme called Copernicus. Both are free for anyone to use.
Sentinel-2
The camera
It photographs your land in normal light and in infrared. A healthy leaf bounces infrared back strongly. A dying one does not. That difference is how we tell them apart.
Sentinel-1
The radar
Radar goes straight through cloud. During the monsoon a camera sees nothing, so Sentinel-1 keeps your record running when the sky is shut.
Drones
The close-up
From orbit, one square covers 10 metres of ground, so it sees a group of trees, not one tree. When you need to look at a single sapling, a drone flies the site.
What happens to the pictures
Your land is cut into 10 metre squares
Every square gets scored on its own, so a problem in one corner does not get hidden by a healthy average across the whole site.
Each square gets three readings
How much healthy green matter is there, read as a vegetation index (NDVI). How much water the plants are holding, read as a moisture index. Whether growth is speeding up or slowing down.
Today is compared with last month
One reading on its own means very little. A reading that keeps falling means the trees are in trouble, and that is what triggers an alert.
The numbers are processed on Google Earth Engine
A platform built for handling satellite data at scale, so adding your hundredth site costs us computing time rather than a field trip.
What we are building next
Carbon credits. The record that proves a tree survived is the same evidence a carbon project needs. We are working towards certifying plantation land under Verra VM0047, an international standard for tree planting, with the income shared with whoever owns the land.
This part is a plan. Everything else on this page already works.
Satellite monitoring questions
How does satellite tree monitoring work?
Healthy leaves reflect near infrared light strongly and dying leaves do not. Sentinel-2 measures that reflected light every few days. We turn it into a health score for every 10 metre square of your plantation and track how it changes over time.
What is NDVI?
NDVI, the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index, compares red and near infrared light to show how much healthy green vegetation is in a patch of land. It is one of the three readings we take for every square.
Can satellites see plantations during the monsoon?
Optical cameras cannot see through cloud, but radar can. Sentinel-1 radar keeps the record running through the monsoon, when most tree planting in India happens.
How accurate is satellite plantation monitoring?
A satellite square covers 10 metres, so it is accurate for groups of trees and whole blocks rather than single saplings. For tree level counts, we fly drones over the sites that need them.