A visualization of the Putamayo region of the Amazon, created by the Forest Carbon Monitoring product. Photo: Planet

Planet has released its Forest Carbon Monitoring product, a new quarterly dataset for monitoring forest growth and change. The company said this data will help establish voluntary carbon markets and help governments implement policies to reduce deforestation and sequester carbon. 

The company said the product can help customers comply with the new EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), track commodity-driven deforestation risks, and help jurisdictions sustainably maintain agricultural exports.

This dataset estimates aboveground carbon, canopy height, and canopy cover over the entire Earth, and its archive goes back to 2021. Planet said the company used deep learning models trained on a massive global library of airborne LiDAR to produce estimates of forest height and cover. It uses NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) spaceborne LiDAR, and satellite imagery from Planetscope, Sentinel-2, Landsat, and ALOS-PALSAR-2. 

Planet CEO Will Marshall believes this product will underpin global carbon markets. 

“To protect our planet and preserve its resources, we have to value carbon and nature into our economy,” Marshall said. “Step one is measurement. To date we faced the choice between tape measures around tree trunks, which is accurate but not scalable, or inaccurate global systems. Planet’s forest carbon data is meant to fix that gap: scalable and precise forest carbon data, at the individual tree level, updated quarterly.”