Welcome to the Lens community! We're thrilled to have you on board. This guide will walk you through the steps of setting up your account so you can start monitoring your areas of interest right away. You’ll find references to support articles found in our comprehensive Knowledge Base throughout this guide. As you scroll, click on underlined text to navigate to the relevant support article where you can find more details.
Collaboration is key! The first thing you'll want to do is invite your team. Navigate to the Settings > Team menu on the left side of the screen to add users and set their permissions. User settings can always be updated by admins from the Team list.
Next, it's time to add your areas of interest, which are called "properties" in Lens. There are a few different ways to do this:
Properties will live in portfolios in Lens – think of them as file folders for keeping everything organized. We’re often asked for advice on setting up portfolios, and while there’s no wrong way to go about it, here are a few of the most common ways we see properties organized:
High-resolution imagery is what makes remote monitoring so powerful. Open the Order pane to see all of the available high-resolution commercial images currently available for your property.
When you're ready to order, here are a few things to keep in mind to get the best possible view of your properties:
After placing an order, an image will take about 15-20 minutes to process and you’ll receive an email when it's ready. You'll then find the processed image in the Date dropdown, as well as any publicly available truecolor imagery for your property.
The Lens Library is full of powerful datasets that can give you deeper insights. Poke around and add any that seem useful to your portfolios!
For example, the vegetation layer is helpful when monitoring forestry activity, since cleared areas will show a decrease in green color values to correspond with the drop in photosynthetic activity. These observations can be saved as notes for documenting and reporting, and are a great way to add more context to observations made with truecolor imagery. Check out this support article for in-depth recommendations of layers to use based on your monitoring goals.
Spotting changes over time is a breeze with Compare Mode. This feature lets you view two images side-by-side, making it easy to identify shifts in vegetation, land use, or anything else you're tracking. Simply click the plus icon at the top of the screen, then choose the dates you’d like to view.
As you monitor your properties, you can create notes to record your observations directly within Lens. Notes are a collaborative tool and allow your whole team to easily see observations about a property, turning individual insights into shared knowledge.
Ready to go beyond looking at truecolor imagery? The analysis tool is a powerful feature for understanding what's happening on your properties. By using high-frequency Sentinel-2 data, you can narrow down the time window of a specific event, like a fire or a flood.
The tool can also be used to evaluate long-term trends in vegetation, water, and any of the other data layers offered in Lens. It turns visual data into powerful insights, helping you see the bigger picture of how your properties are changing over time. Be sure to check out the Lens Library to enable specific datasets for your account.
In the video above, Analysis is being used to narrow down the time window of when forestry work occurred. Once that date range is determined, commercial imagery could be ordered to spot equipment and associated impacts.
When you're ready to share your findings, you can generate reports with just one click. Export your notes and imagery into a customizable PDF report that's perfect for sharing with stakeholders, partners, or simply saving for your own records.
The best way to learn is by doing, so dive in and start exploring Lens! If you’re on a Standard or Enterprise plan, you have access to other features like Lookouts, parcel data, and more. We encourage you to explore and reach out with any questions.
As questions come up, our Knowledge Base has all of the answers you're looking for. If you aren't finding the answers to your questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us at lens@upstream.tech.
Happy monitoring and welcome to Lens!
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