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If you manage hundreds or even thousands of acres of land or assets, you know—changes happen fast. Whether monitoring utility corridors, transportation networks, or conservation easements, early visibility into change is essential for safety, compliance, and long-term sustainability.
We know that getting eyes on the ground happens infrequently. Field visits are expensive, time-consuming, and can only cover a limited area. By the time your team makes it out to a site where a change has occurred, that issue may have already escalated. Lens Lookout, our automated, customizable change detection alerts function, identifies significant shifts across your areas of interest using satellite data—helping your team act faster when something unexpected happens.
Let’s look at two examples of how organizations use Lookout to stay ahead of change—one focused on risk response, the other on stewardship.
For conservation organizations, staying aware of new development or clearing within protected lands is critical to upholding easement terms. Traditional monitoring methods—desktop reviews or field visits—are valuable but often limited by time and geography. Most land trusts focus on an annual monitoring cadence, and unexpected changes that happen within that window are often caught only during the next monitoring visit.
Customers can customize the Lens Lookout feature to track the specific changes they most care about. In the case of tracking new construction and land disturbance, our pre-built Vegetation Drop Detection feature can automatically flag areas where vegetation cover has decreased within or around easement boundaries. Using lightweight AI, this lookout flags only areas where there is a change from the typical seasonal pattern of vegetation we would expect to see on your site. Because most construction requires some amount of vegetation disturbance, this can serve as a proxy for disruption of a conservation property that warrants further review.
Unlike many other change detection tools on the market, Lens Lookouts can be customized to reflect your preferred thresholds of change and can also be set to only look at specific areas of the property. In the case of conservation easement monitoring, partners may choose to set their Lookouts for only areas outside of their Building Envelope, ensuring they don’t receive alerts for permitted uses. These alerts are meant to serve as an early signal that something on the ground has changed—such as new construction of a building, encroachment from a neighboring property, or clearing for utilities. From there, stewards can open Lens, review recent imagery, confirm the nature of the change, and document follow-up actions directly in the platform.
For example in 2022, Lens Lookout detected a vegetation drop in eastern Massachusetts along a conservation easement boundary. The alert identified clearing activity on an adjacent residential property, prompting the easement holder to plan a site visit to confirm the clearing activity did not encroach upon the easement boundary. Knowledge of this clearing activity empowered the easement holder to proactively work with the neighboring landowner to ensure encroachment did not become a problem.
This kind of automated awareness has already helped easement holders strengthen compliance while reducing manual review time. By identifying change as it happens, Lookout ensures that field time goes toward verification and relationship-building, not searching for issues or coming across surprises.
For infrastructure managers, fires and flooding can be sudden, costly, and operationally disruptive. While these events generally can’t be detected in real time with satellite imagery due to the cadence of captures, understanding where fire or flood impacts have already occurred—especially near power corridors, substations, pipelines, and access roads—is critical for prioritizing response and recovery.
Lens Lookout supports post-event fire and flood detection by automatically identifying changes on the landscape that are consistent with burn scars, vegetation loss, or inundation. These alerts help utilities and other infrastructure operators quickly flag areas that may have been affected, often before detailed field reports, inspections, or third-party assessments are available.
Earlier this year at a remote California site near critical infrastructure, Lens detected a small 20-acre burn using our Burn Index layer that was consistent with a recent fire. By surfacing this change automatically, the landowner was able to prioritize follow-up monitoring, assess nearby assets, and plan post-fire recovery work. Rather than relying solely on periodic patrols, Lens Lookout provided timely, post-event visibility to focus resources where impacts were most likely.
The same approach applies to flooding and standing water: detecting where water has recently encroached on rights-of-way or facilities enables faster assessment, safer access planning, and more informed recovery decisions—without claiming live or active event detection.
By delivering automated, post-event visibility into fire and flood impacts, Lens Lookout helps infrastructure teams move faster from uncertainty to action—directing inspections, recovery, and mitigation efforts where they’re needed most.
Define precise areas of interest and apply monitoring across parcels, corridors, buffers, or management zones—matching how land and infrastructure are actually managed.
Set minimum area thresholds to focus alerts on changes that matter, and use inside/outside overlay rules to monitor within (or exclude) specific boundaries such as wetlands, rights-of-way, building envelopes, or riparian buffers.
Limit alerts to relevant time windows—such as growing season, fire season, or construction periods—so monitoring reflects real-world workflows and natural landscape variability.
Use a single framework to monitor vegetation clearing, post-event fire or flood impacts, development activity, and encroachment—without needing separate tools or manual review.
Alerts are designed to be interpretable and decision-ready, helping teams quickly assess what happened, where it occurred, and whether follow-up is needed.
Once configured, Lookouts run continuously in the background, providing peace of mind between site visits and helping teams focus limited field resources where attention is most needed.
Lens Lookouts provide a set-it-and-forget-it layer of ongoing oversight between scheduled monitoring visits, patrols, or inspections. Once configured, they run automatically in the background, continuously scanning for meaningful landscape changes across a range of risk scenarios and alerting teams only when something warrants attention. This always-on awareness reduces blind spots, supports earlier awareness of emerging issues, and gives teams confidence that priority areas aren’t being overlooked—allowing limited time and field resources to be deployed more strategically.
Sound helpful? Learn more by getting in touch with our team.