SWIFTForest

Forest managers struggle to see stress, harvesting, illegal clearing and fire damage across large, remote estates without costly field visits. SWIFTForest, from South African GIS company Swift Geospatial, is an online platform that turns recurring satellite imagery into compartment-level forest intelligence, in two variants.

Commercial Forestry Monitoring collects Planet's 3 m, 8-band PlanetScope imagery over the customer's uploaded areas of interest at a weekly, biweekly or monthly cadence, then runs NDVI-based compartment health, in-field stress and harvesting detection analyses. Natural Forest Monitoring fuses third-party forest disturbance alerts with Sentinel-2 or PlanetScope imagery and in-house verification, updating weekly to flag deforestation, degradation and illegal logging, with heatmap risk analysis and EUDR risk assessment and reporting.

Results appear in web dashboards with map, monitoring and customisable report pages, all outputs are archived for trend analysis, and the platform is REST API compatible. Optional add-ons include automated fire monitoring (NASA thermal detections trigger an alert and seven days of Planet imagery for burn-scar assessment), tree count and height, above-ground biomass, biodiversity assessments, compartment digitisation, in-field surveys and higher-resolution Planet SkySat or Vantor imagery.

• Harvesting detection: a log of harvested hectares and dates, flagging possible illegal logging.
• Stated limits: Swift notes tree counts are not reliable after canopy closure and volume cannot be derived from 2D imagery alone.

Swift Geospatial states it monitors over 100 million hectares of forestry land worldwide; Planet reports Swift has monitored around 12,000 sq km of South African commercial forest per week for seven years. Pricing is quoted per hectare.