IO Change Detection

IO Change Detection is a change-monitoring data service from Impact Observatory, a Washington, DC company that builds AI-powered maps from satellite imagery. It is aimed at organisations that need to know where land is changing without analysing imagery over large areas themselves, so that they can focus attention and resources on the places that matter.

The service uses satellite imagery to identify changes to land within an area of interest chosen by the buyer, with a minimum order of 100 km². Changes are mapped at 10-metre resolution as annual, bi-annual or quarterly change, for dates from 2017 to the present, and delivered as raster or vector geospatial files in the EPSG:3857 (WGS 84) projection. Monitoring is customised to the changes each buyer wants to track.

Impact Observatory groups the applications in two areas. Infrastructure monitoring detects and tracks the progress of infrastructure, roads and buildings; its published example shows changes to roads and coastline detected along the Korean Demilitarized Zone between 2022 and 2024. Environmental monitoring covers changing water levels, deforestation, land conversion, and changing wetlands and coastlines; a second example shows lake water-level changes in North Korea over the same period. Both examples are displayed on Planet Labs satellite imagery.

Orders go through Impact Observatory's sales team rather than its online store, and no prices are published for this product.