Lens is a web-based application that allows you and your team to monitor landscapes with ease and efficiency. Lens saves our customers time and money by making it easy for you to access satellite, aerial, and environmental data, analyze site conditions, and generate reports.
Lens is used by over 170 organizations for a wide variety of uses including conservation land monitoring, natural resource management, and project planning and diligence. Our customers include non-profit conservation organizations, ecological restoration firms, philanthropic funders, Fortune 500 companies, carbon project investors, and more.
In Lens, you can:■ Review free, public imagery and data to see how your site has changed over time■ Order high-resolution imagery from a range of satellite and aerial vendors■ Compare images with a built-in slider bar to identify changes and create notes about your observations■ Work collaboratively with colleagues to review site conditions■ Generate detailed reports with one click■ Analyze short- and long-term trends in vegetation, surface water and land use changes ■ Receive alerts right to your inbox when there’s a drop in vegetation cover or change in US tax parcel ownership for any of your sites
Lens is like a “buyers’ club” for commercial satellite and aerial imagery - we aggregate imagery from all the top sources with competitive pricing, allowing you to choose the best possible image for your needs. Maxar, Airbus, and Nearmap imagery are all available for purchase in Lens at the rates listed on our pricing page. Lens customers can also order custom imagery and basemaps from Planet, Airbus, and Near Space Labs. We also include up-to-date data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites at no extra cost, as well NAIP aerial flyovers in the US, and Planet-NICFI PlanetScope basemaps in tropical areas.
Lens works globally. Certain data sources may vary in geographic coverage—you can learn more here.
Sort of! If you’ve used Google Earth, the data you see in Lens might look really familiar and you’ll have no trouble finding your way around. In Lens, however, you’re able to access much more data, and you’re able to select images from specific points in time to make the most reliable observations possible. While Google Earth might update coverage for your area every few years, in Lens you’re typically able to access many images each year, often within 24 hours of capture. With this higher-frequency data, you can make more precise observations and be sure that you have the most reliable insight possible.
It depends. Lens aggregates imagery options from various remote sensing data providers. The geographic coverage, timing, and specifications of the data we offer vary, giving you the ability to choose exactly what works best for your monitoring needs. Commercial imagery vendors do not guarantee coverage over specific geographies at specific times of year. If you’d like additional control over the imagery capture process, we also make it easy to “task” imagery on demand from our vendor partners. Non-commercial data sources like Sentinel-2 or NICFI capture imagery at a regular cadence, in these cases every 5 days and every month, respectively.
We make all sorts of data options available in Lens with spatial resolution as fine as 30-cm, so you can use whichever options best fit your needs . You can find a comparison of current imagery sources and their resolutions here.
In Lens you only pay for what you need. When ordering imagery through Lens, we’ll charge a cents per acre fee for the area within your property boundaries. And if you have large properties, we even have a partial ordering feature so you can order and pay for a specific area of interest on your site.
You sure can! Many of our customers use Lens to see the history of their project sites. How far back you can look will depend on a lot of factors, and satellite data has gotten even better in the last few years. Some of our imagery sources go back as far as 2003, and we also work with satellites that just launched in the last year. You can generally expect to see pretty consistent coverage of sites starting around 2014.
For our Enterprise subscribers, we can import your imagery if it's in the right format. This may result in an extra fee for storage and processing depending on the scale of your need. Reach out if you have specific questions about your data needs.
We make it easy for you to connect Lens with other commonly-used platforms like Landscape and ArcGIS. We also provide API access for custom integrations to our Enterprise subscribers. If you have specific questions, feel free to reach out.
Absolutely! Lens is meant to be collaborative so you and your colleagues have a shared source of truth for data and interpretation. You can invite others on your team to your Lens account, and customize permissions based on their role. Our plans also have different seat limits, so you can determine which one is best based on the size of your team.
We keep our license and user agreements updated here for you to reference anytime.
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