SkyTruth Monitor

SkyTruth Monitor is a free, browser-based mapping platform from the US nonprofit SkyTruth that lets communities, advocates, journalists and agencies view satellite imagery and environmental data anywhere on Earth without specialist GIS skills. It addresses what SkyTruth describes as environmental information that is scattered and buried behind technical barriers.

Monitor retrieves Sentinel-1 radar, 10 m Sentinel-2 multispectral and Landsat 8 and 9 imagery through Google Earth Engine as it becomes available, typically every 12 to 36 hours, plus 1 m NAIP aerial photography for the continental United States. Users can filter scenes by date and cloud cover, replace cloudy pixels, display spectral indices such as NDVI, NDWI and NBR, and compare imagery side by side over time. A library of curated layers covers oil and gas infrastructure, land cover and forest disturbance (including GLAD and RADD alerts), protected areas and US wildfires. Users can upload their own GeoJSON, KML, shapefile or CSV data, draw areas of interest, annotate maps and share them by URL.

Registered users can subscribe to email alerts for US areas of interest, built from National Response Center spill reports and Pennsylvania and Florida environmental records; alerts can be charted and exported as KML, CSV or GeoJSON.

Monitor began in 2011 as SkyTruth Alerts and was redesigned and renamed in 2024. Peru's protected-areas agency SERNANP uses it to track illegal gold mining, agricultural clearing and wildfire burn scars. Monitor does not offer satellite image downloads.