Blog A4IP’s Venture-Out Event with Planet: Watch, Share, and Submit your Feedback

Access to high-resolution satellite imagery and analytics capabilities can equip scientists and innovators with valuable insights to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of agricultural and climate research, to better understand the impacts of different interventions, and to support the development of new technologies and solutions aligning with CGIAR’s vision of a food-secure future.

A key venture working on the cutting edge of geospatial innovation is Planet: the B corporation founded by a former NASA scientist that is revolutionizing and democratizing the satellite industry through high-resolution and high-frequency satellite solutions. The Accelerate for Impact Platform (A4IP) seeks to learn from successful ventures like Planet and explore their synergies with CGIAR, so on January 24th, the A4IP delivered Venture-Out Events: Bridging Science and Entrepreneurship in Geospatial Data with Planet.

“Planet’s unique stream of high-resolution satellite imagery enables precision agriculture at scale and could unlock new frontier for multidisciplinary research. Through this interactive webinar we can expose CGIAR scientists to the ag-tech innovation ecosystem and trigger their creativity to combine and leverage new technologies and data for transformative innovations.” said Gianpiero Menza, Senior Manager at Alliance/CGIAR. 

The opening of the event featured agriculture specialists from Planet, Misty Tucker and Kinsie Rayburn, presenting Planet’s work on the cutting edge of geospatial data innovation; highlighting use cases in crop monitoring, forest and pasture, and smallholder mapping. "The impact of utilizing geospatial data to assess and address environmental-based activities is vast. Even more impactful is the collaboration across industries and disciplines that the Venture-Out audiences and panelists represent,” Planet agriculture specialist Kinsie Rayburn said.

Following this, CGIAR experts Jawoo Koo (IFPRI/CGIAR), Aniruddha Ghosh, Louis Reymondin and Wendy Francesconi (Alliance/CGIAR) joined the stage to reflect on the ideas presented and explore questions from the audience.

“It's so exciting to see a lot of innovative use cases,” CGIAR Consortium for Spatial Information (CSI) Global Coordinator Jawoo Koo remarked to open the discussion portion. “A few months ago, we did a survey across researchers in CGIAR to see what kind of use cases we already have, or we want to have once we have this kind of data accessible. There are lots of similarities of what we do already covered in the presentation – for example, real-time mapping of agricultural geography like crop type mapping growth and unit estimate. ... We were just discussing the other day how we can strengthen or, you know, amplify the leaf area index (LAI) data collection on the ground, because this can be an input to the crop growth model and different types of modeling activities, and then that calibrated model can be used to estimate yield growth.”

For more insights like these, watch the event hosted on the A4IP YouTube channel and provide us your feedback for how Planet’s data and tools can be applied. "The scientific community and commercial organizations working together to find novel approaches to complex global issues is so very critical for the future of our world,” said Misty Tucker, Industry Principal for Agriculture at Planet. “Participating in events like this one is an excellent way to gain and share new information across many facets of industry and encourage collaboration among the participants.”
 

Venture-Out Events are brought to you by the Accelerate for Impact Platform (A4IP) – the Alliance/CGIAR’s venture-focused Research for Development space to co-design, accelerate and fund market-driven and multidisciplinary innovation at the nexus of agriculture, environment, and health.

Learn more about the Accelerate for Impact Platform: https://alliancebioversityciat.org/tools-innovations/accelerate-impact-platform