Planet Labs PBC, a leading source of daily data and insights about Earth, announced today the conclusion of its acquisition of Salo Sciences, a San Francisco-based climate technology business that provides cutting-edge technologies to evaluate Earth’s ever-changing ecosystems. Planet announced in December that it has struck an agreement to buy Salo Sciences.
Planet intends to expand its products by acquiring Salo Sciences (Salo) in order to enable customers to estimate carbon stocks globally, monitor forest change, and reduce climate risks. Salo’s current products use Planet’s unique daily PlanetScope data as the base for building forest carbon and other forest-related data layers.
These products will enable climate and sustainability solutions and eventually become Planetary Variables, starting with Forest Carbon, expanding Planet’s data offerings with the capability to measure important conditions on Earth’s surface.
Given previous technology limitations, estimating forest carbon has typically relied on indirect and proxy measurements of forest area change. Through this acquisition, Planet’s offerings will expand to enable customers to measure the critical climate services that forests provide, and work to change economic incentives around land use to meet global climate and sustainability goals. This will be a pivotal tool needed to scale and enable systematic measurements of critical data.
Salo’s team of world-class scientists and professionals will join Planet’s operations in San Francisco, bringing deep experience in forest ecology, climate modeling, and wildfire risk. The Salo team has used Earth observation datasets from Planet to give automated information on worldwide forest ecosystems, including the creation of the California Forest Observatory (CFO).
The system provides continuously updated views of wildfire hazard and forest health for California and beyond (by combining artificial intelligence, satellite imagery, and airborne lidar data to generate detailed data on vegetation fuels such as tree heights, canopy cover, density, and understory ladder fuels). Salo and Planet also work together on Upstream Tech’s Lens for Carbon, which is used to track reforestation and forest carbon.
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 over 30 TB of data per day. Planet provides mission-critical data, advanced insights, and software solutions to over 800 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.
Salo Sciences is a climate technology company that provides high resolution monitoring services and analytics for natural climate solutions and risk management. Salo uses three key tools—satellite data, artificial intelligence & ecological modeling— to accelerate nature-based solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss. Salo built and manages the Forest Observatory, a high-resolution satellite-based vegetation and wildfire hazard mapping and monitoring system to improve forest resilience and land management decision making.
