Getting out of the field and into the sky — how satellites are helping protect land and preserve fresh water

Lauren Lynch
Jul 10, 2017 · 5 min read

Last year, the U.S. National Park Service celebrated its centennial birthday; 100 years of protecting America’s greatest natural landscapes for future generations. While the below map doesn’t do justice to the extraordinary nature of this accomplishment, it is worth taking a moment to consider.

Focus on the continental U.S. (apologies to Alaska and Hawaii for excluding them in this thought exercise), and try to find any of the parks that you’ve been to. (Or, if you haven’t yet had the opportunity to visit any of these amazing places, drop what you’re doing now, strap on your hiking boots, get in the car and go!) For anyone who’s been to Yellowstone, Death Valley, the Everglades, or the Grand Canyon, think about the immense size of those parks.

Now consider this:

Since 1891, land trusts in the United States have protected over 56 million acres of forests, wetlands, wildlife habitat and working farms across the country — more than twice the area of all national parks in the continental U.S. That’s huge!

But what exactly is a land trust, you may ask? Well, generally speaking land trusts are non-profit charitable organizations which acquire and hold land for the purpose of conserving that land for future generations. There are lots of different land trusts (over 1,363 in the U.S. to be precise) with many different missions. According to the Land Trust Alliance’s 2015 National Land Trust Census Report the top three priorities identified by the more than 1,300 active land trusts in the U.S. between 2010–2015 include:

  1. Habitat: Preserving important natural areas or wildlife habitats,
  2. Water: Protecting water quality, including wetlands, and
  3. Agriculture: Conserving working farms or ranch lands

No matter the mission, land trusts typically rely on a suite of tools for acquiring and managing the land they protect: purchasing title (outright land ownership), purchasing conservation easements (the right to an interest in the land, but not the title to the land (e.g. the right to develop or subdivide a property)), and joint efforts with other non-profit organizations and/or local and state government agencies (for example assistance negotiating or preparing for land acquisition by other organizations or agencies.) This multi-pronged approach to land acquisition enables land trusts to preserve land without having to buy, in fee, all of the land they protect (this would be prohibitively expensive). Additionally, since conservation easements are collaborative and voluntary in nature, they play an important role in maintaining the important social fabric of communities (by targeting only the specific rights needed to accomplish certain conservation objectives, the property can continue to provide important social and economic benefits to the owner and the community at large.)

But land isn’t cheap. Pre-acquisition, land trusts pour immense resources into scoping prospective properties to assess the value of their land and water resources. This is because, unlike comparing prices for a coffee maker on Amazon or Google, comparing the value of land and water resources, even within a relatively small geography, is extremely complex. And acquiring land titles and conservation easements is just the beginning. Stewarding and monitoring hundreds, even thousands of acres of land is an immense job, requiring a large chunk of most land trusts’ very limited resources. Imagine you work with a team that has just purchased a conservation easement on 1500 acres of land bordering a critical wildlife refuge. Twice a year you get in your car and make the trek out to visit the property to ensure that the terms of your easement are being met. The amount of time spent in transit outnumbers the amount of time you spend conducting the necessary monitoring activities on site by 3:1, but given the dispersed nature of your trust’s easements, there isn’t any other way to monitor your properties. Or is there…

This is where Upstream Tech comes in. By combining satellite imagery analysis with machine learning, we’re developing an automated platform to monitor and measure land and water resources at scale. This technology targets the inefficiencies faced by land trusts, particularly those working at the intersection of freshwater conservation and agriculture, by providing near-real time, scalable compliance monitoring and tools to quantify the value of water rights and their associated land.

Our Monitor tool targets the current inefficiencies of manual compliance monitoring. Using satellite imagery to track in near real time whether a field is irrigated, organizations can better understand water use patterns as a growing season progresses, and conservation easement holders can easily monitor whether the terms of an easement are being met (e.g., whether a field is irrigated during a given season).

The same technology is deployed in another application, History, which quantifies two decades of water use reliability, crop type and irrigation technology helping users understand the risk and value associated with buying or selling a piece of land and its associated water rights.

Both of these tools enable users to make data-driven decisions more quickly, and more cost-effectively, than would be possible through on-the-ground monitoring.

Now consider the following:

  1. Habitat: In the past 40 years, we have seen huge losses in wildlife habitat and biological diversity across the globe, with the most dramatic impacts occurring in freshwater species; according to a 2012 report developed by WWF, frogs showed the biggest declines, at 79% population reduction.
  2. Water: In 1900, approximately 2% of the global population was affected by chronic water shortage. This increased to 9% of the globally population by 1960, and 35% by 2005. Today, half of all cities and three-quarters of all irrigated farms are experiencing recurring water scarcity.
  3. Agriculture: As the global population grows to a projected 9 billion people by 2050, the agriculture sector will need to produce roughly double its current production. Often, this results in the conversion of forest habitat to new agricultural fields, and requires the diversion of additional water from already strained watersheds.

In short, the work that land trusts are doing now is only going to become more critical throughout the next century, and land trusts are going to need some serious help. That is why Upstream Tech is partnering with organizations such as The Nature Conservancy, the Colorado Water Trust, and Trout Unlimited to pilot our technology so that we can make improvements to best meet the needs of conservation organizations doing this critical work. If you’re interested in partnering with us or in learning more about our work, send us an email at team@upstream.tech.

Upstream Tech

https://medium.com/upstream

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