Planet completes acquisition of Salo Sciences

Integration to Bolster Forest Carbon Monitoring Tool and Climate Solutions Data

Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a leading provider of daily data and insights about Earth, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Salo Sciences, a San Francisco-based climate technology company that provides cutting-edge solutions to measure Earth’s constantly changing ecosystems. In December, Planet announced it had signed an agreement to acquire Salo Sciences.

With the purchase of Salo Sciences (Salo), Planet plans to further develop its offerings to enable customers to quantify carbon stocks globally, monitor forest change, and mitigate climate risks. Salo’s current products leverage Planet’s differentiated daily PlanetScope data as a foundational layer to build forest carbon, and other forest-related, data layers. These products will enable climate and sustainability solutions and eventually become Planetary Variables, starting with Forest Carbon, expanding Planet’s data offerings with the capability to measure important conditions on Earth’s surface.

Given previous technology limitations, estimating forest carbon has typically relied on indirect and proxy measurements of forest area change. Through this acquisition, Planet’s offerings will expand to enable customers to measure the critical climate services that forests provide, and work to change economic incentives around land use to meet global climate and sustainability goals. This will be a pivotal tool needed to scale and enable systematic measurements of critical data.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Salo’s analytics and modeling technology, when combined with Planet’s daily scan, are the foundations to enable reliable carbon estimates in forests and to do so at scale,” said CEO and Co-Founder of Planet, Will Marshall. “We’ve worked for years with the Salo team, and they are going to be a powerful addition to our product suite helping us leap towards understanding forest conservation and helping us combat biodiversity loss at scale.”

Salo’s team of world-class scientists and professionals with deep expertise in forest ecology, climate modeling, and wildfire risk will join Planet’s operations in San Francisco. The Salo team has leveraged Planet’s Earth observation datasets to deliver automated information on global forest ecosystems, including the development of the California Forest Observatory (CFO). The system provides continuously updated views of wildfire hazard and forest health for California and beyond (using artificial intelligence, satellite imagery and airborne lidar data) to produce detailed data on vegetation fuels—including tree heights, canopy cover, density and understory ladder fuels. Salo and Planet also collaborate on Upstream Tech’s Lens for Carbon to monitor reforestation and forest carbon.

“Salo Sciences was founded to help implement and scale nature-based solutions to climate change. There is no better way for us to accelerate that mission than joining forces with Planet to launch a next-generation system to monitor the carbon stocks and health of every tree on Earth,” said Dr. David Marvin, CEO and Co-founder of Salo Sciences. “Better protection, restoration, and management of our global forest ecosystems will play a key role in climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation in the decades to come.”

The transaction was closed on January 3, 2023. This is Planet’s fifth acquisition (BlackBridge ‘15, Terra Bella ‘17, Boundless ‘19, and VanderSat ‘21).

Related News