Case Study: Swift Geospatial achieves weekly timber and plantation monitoring insights with Planet imagery

Swift Geospatial leverages near-daily Planet imagery to create proprietary dashboards providing quantitative GIS analysis on timber harvests and plantation health

swift geospatial, a South African company providing GIS analyses, needed a way to monitor vast, fragmented timber plantations for harvest audits and health checks for their clients. Their challenge was obtaining timely, accurate, and cost-effective imagery to cover approximately 12,000 km² weekly, as public data was too coarse and other high-resolution options were too expensive.

Planet provided its high-frequency, medium-resolution satellite imagery, which swift geospatial uses to create weekly cloud-free mosaics. They run analyses on these mosaics in their GIS software to create custom dashboards for clients. The solution from Planet gave clients their first feasible method for monitoring plantation health, leading to significant logistical and operational efficiencies in harvest tracking and contractor management.

Swift Geospatial

James Saunders

Remote Sensing Specialist