Case Study: Map Impact uncovers drivers of Lake Windermere water pollution with PlanetScope

ow Map Impact Changed the Narrative About Water Pollution at Lake Windermere with PlanetScope

Map Impact, a UK geospatial analytics provider, faced the challenge of understanding the complex environmental dynamics affecting the water quality of England's Lake Windermere. They needed to overcome the limitations of public satellite data, which suffered from low resolution and frequent data gaps due to cloud cover, to accurately analyze factors like algal blooms. To gain deeper insights, they partnered with vendor Planet and utilized their PlanetScope satellite data.

Planet's solution provided Map Impact with high-resolution, near-daily PlanetScope imagery. This offered a 3x spatial and 5x temporal resolution increase over public data, enabling detailed observation of the lake and smaller surrounding water bodies while filling in data gaps caused by weather. The results uncovered new correlations, showing that temperature fluctuations and human movement had a greater impact on algae growth than agricultural runoff. This established a baseline for the lake and provided the UK government with actionable insights for environmental management.

Map Impact

Paul Bate

Map Impact