As Canada enters yet another year of severe and increasingly frequent climate events — from early-season wildfires to flash floods and coastal erosion — governments are under growing pressure to adapt faster and act smarter. Over the past few years, several provinces and federal departments have begun integrating near-real-time satellite imagery into their disaster response and environmental monitoring systems. The goal: to gain clearer visibility into rapidly changing conditions on the ground, and to make decisions based on what’s unfolding today — not last week.

Planet has been at the center of this shift. Through new and expanded partnerships with Canadian provincial governments, the company’s high-cadence satellite data is now being used to support emergency response, monitor natural resources, and inform long-term policy across forestry, agriculture, and climate-sensitive regions. With daily imaging capabilities, Planet’s data has enabled agencies to track wildfire activity, assess fuel loads, monitor permafrost thaw, and even detect unauthorized activity in remote coastal zones.

At GeoIgnite 2025 in Ottawa, we sat down with Cassidy Rankine, Government Account Executive at Planet, to talk about how this technology is being used on the ground in Canada. In the interview that follows, Rankin outlines the growing role of satellite data in public sector decision-making — and why accessibility and automation are just as important as speed and accuracy in today’s climate landscape.

Can you walk us through some of the most impactful ways Planet is supporting the Canadian government?

We work with a number of provincial and federal government agencies. One big area is emergency relief and public safety programs — wildfire detection, flooding detection — before, during, and after events. Because our satellites are always imaging and continuously updating every day, it provides key, timely information for emergency responders in times of crisis and disaster.

We also support natural resource management — forestry, sustainable logging practices, disaster management. And we help in agricultural monitoring, looking at climate-related risks, crop production, and food security. In coastal areas, we support erosion monitoring, coastal defense, and legal fishing enforcement.

We work a lot with compliance and enforcement agencies to help accelerate policy and mandate adoption towards new government initiatives for sustainability and environmental management.

Which agencies do you work most closely with?

We work very closely with the core natural resource agencies in Canada. NRCan is one of our customers and long-term partners. We also work with Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Parks Canada, and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Those are the main groups we work with on the civil side.

We also work with the Department of National Defence on national security initiatives. And we’ve been working with the Canadian government for a little over 20 years now. Our Canadian business is based in Alberta.

How does Planet’s high-frequency satellite data compare with traditional government-owned satellite systems, especially in areas like disaster response?

That’s a really good question. That’s really what we specialize in. We have launched hundreds of small satellites – the Doves. The newer generation is called the Super Dove. These are in orbit in a ring around the planet, scanning the majority of Canada — and actually the majority of the Earth’s landmass — every single day.

That’s what we call very high-cadence satellite imagery. Compared to traditional public and government missions, which usually have a lower revisit rate—from a few days to a few weeks between observations — PlanetScope, our flagship constellation, enables close-to-real-time insights and imagery over fast-evolving events.

How are you leveraging AI or machine learning in these processes?

We have a great team working on AI solutions. A number of our products actually fuse commercial satellite data with public satellite data to generate what we call derivative analytics — or planetary variables — measuring key phenomena for how the Earth is changing.

These products use AI to mask out clouds and interference and produce analysis-ready data. That means less manual preprocessing or interpretation is needed to get the data ready for modeling or intelligence applications.

Accessibility is a big concern, especially for smaller players. How is Planet making its data more accessible to municipalities, nonprofits, or Indigenous communities?

Planet takes data accessibility very seriously — it’s part of our core mission. Our mission is to image the whole planet every day and make that information more readily available, accessible, and actionable.

We have a number of programs that make our data services more affordable to smaller municipal governments, nonprofit agencies, and Indigenous and First Nations groups. So come and talk to us about those programs.

We are also making sure this data is usable for people who don’t necessarily have a deep technical geospatial background. So, they can still access and implement the information we collect from our space platforms more easily.