Welsh Government-Sponsored Living Wales Research Project Leverages Planet Data For Green Agricultural Policies

Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a leading provider of daily data and insights about Earth, today shared a recent initiative supporting European green agricultural policies with Living Wales, a Welsh government-sponsored research project led by Aberystwyth University. Living Wales is leveraging insights from Planet's historical and real-time satellite data to model future landscape scenarios and monitor progress against them. This data is helping to inform Wales’ land policy design, improving confidence in greening measures, and enabling close monitoring and assessment of policy impact over time.

Planet is aiding Living Wales by providing PlanetScope data at high-spatial resolution and with high temporal frequencies. Planet owns and operates the world’s largest Earth observation constellation with over 200 satellites currently in orbit. These satellites provide a line scanner of the Earth, imaging every terrestrial location on the planet every single day. By providing these unprecedented insights of global change, Planet supports Living Wales to monitor environmental activities and build robust data-informed models.

“Land use change for agriculture is a leading cause of biodiversity loss and of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and Planet believes that by providing governments and research initiatives with frequent and reliable satellite datasets, we can support a sustainable and informed revolution in this industry, thereby helping the planetary crisis,” said Planet co-founder and CEO Will Marshall.

With Planet’s data, the Living Wales team is able to retrieve environmental descriptors. Land cover maps are key to a comprehensive understanding of how land-use impacts surrounding ecosystems, and environmental descriptors—for example, crop type, foliar chemistry, leaf air index, and many others—are the building blocks for creating these maps.

By monitoring historical land cover data to predict future landscapes, from flooding sequences and vegetation productivity to habitat changes and carbon dynamics, the Living Wales team evaluates how different scenarios impact land use with Planet data. In the process, the team generates future land cover maps, monitors progress toward climate goals, and adapts goals as needed over time. Their team also evaluates the economic values of landscapes—the implications of moving towards local food production and supply, and the contributions of ecosystems to mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and restoration of biodiversity.

“You need Earth observation data to understand how our past activities and natural events and processes have shaped the landscapes we see today, but also to plan the future landscape to meet the needs not only of the current generation, but also those that follow,” said Dr. Richard Lucas, Sêr Cymru Research Chair in Earth Observation at Aberystwyth University, currently leading the Living Wales project.

The Living Wales’ framework is being adopted as a Welsh national approach to land monitoring, providing national, international, and individual leaders with a working blueprint for a proactive, collaborative, and transparent approach. The approach is also quantitative and is being developed for use in environmental and economic accounts, both in Wales and internationally.

In its aim to achieve climate neutrality in Wales by 2035, Living Wales contributes to policy transformation that ensures the well-being of both people and nature. By using Planet data, Wales has successfully transitioned from monitoring maps to proactive and positive action.

About Planet Labs PBC

Planet is a leading provider of global, daily satellite imagery and geospatial solutions. Planet is driven by a mission to image the world every day, and make change visible, accessible and actionable. Founded in 2010 by three NASA scientists, Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest Earth observation fleet of imaging satellites, capturing and compiling data from over 3 million images per day. Planet provides mission-critical data, advanced insights, and software solutions to over 700 customers, comprising the world’s leading agriculture, forestry, intelligence, education and finance companies and government agencies, enabling users to simply and effectively derive unique value from satellite imagery. Planet is a public benefit corporation trading on the New York Stock Exchange as PL. To learn more visit www.planet.com and follow us on Twitter.

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