Q1 Newsletter

We're already one quarter of the way through the year, and our team is welcoming signs of spring with open arms! Well, part of our team is welcoming spring... some of us have been shoveling snow while others are enjoying summer-like weather. Through the seasonal shifts and extreme weather, we've been working on new improvements to our products. Read on for some exciting updates from Lens and HydroForecast, and meet the newest additions to the Upstream Tech team.

Lens

The latest news from Lens. Get in touch at lens@upstream.tech.

Whether you've been using Lens for years or months, you've watched it evolve with new features and ideas. We're driven to make it easier to discover and document changes on the places that matter to you, a goal that has remained constant since the beginning. With that in mind, we've been hard at work on some new improvements to Lens that will help your reports and notes shine. Check out the latest:

1. Refreshed Reports. Reporting is a vital part of remote monitoring workflows. To improve accessibility and ease-of-use, you can now save reports directly in Lens! Gone are the days of re-creating reports to make an update to the summary text, adjust zoom levels, or modify the order of notes. Now you can simply reopen your Lens report and pick up right where you left off. And that's not all. The team introduced Smart Summaries in Reports as a beta feature for Plus and Enterprise users. This feature harnesses the power of AI to quickly generate a summary based on the notes within your Lens report. Think of it as your trusty sidekick, helping you draft summaries in a fraction of the time that you can then review and revise as-needed.
2. Fresh Functionalities for Notes. It’s never been easier to stay organized in Lens thanks to the introduction of Note Tags. Spice up your notes by adding a tag to see relevant context at-a-glance, and easily filter to view notes of a certain tag. We've also added the ability to download a polygon associated with a note. The polygon will export as a shapefile, which you can use in GIS or re-upload to Lens as a custom overlay.
3. New Overlays Available in the Library. Overlays provide helpful context when monitoring, and we’ve added three new ones to the Library recently. They include: US Protected Areas, derived from the USGS Protected Areas Database of the U.S. (PAD-US), the Massachusetts Wetlands Inventory, which is the product of over 45 years of work by the National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) and its collaborators, and Natural Gas Pipelines, built with data obtained by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Check out this resource for more details about these overlays. 

Outside of Lens itself, our team was busy connecting with folks at several conferences over the last few months. We discussed carbon markets and climate policy at North American Carbon World, talked to folks in the conservation space at the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, and presented at the Environmental Law Institute's virtual workshop "New Approaches for Integrating Remote Sensing Tools and Other New Technologies into Compensatory Mitigation Programs." Next up, we're speaking at the Corporate Investments into Forestry & Biodiversity Summit on April 11th— we hope to catch you there!

Hot Tip 🔥 from Alison, Lens Customer Success Manager

Before we jump into this edition's hot tip, we're thrilled to introduce you to Alison O'Neill, the newest member of the Lens team! Alison is our new Customer Success Manager and will be carrying the torch as Miles transitions to the Lens Growth & Partnerships team. Now, onto the tip!

This 5,500 acre property experienced a wildfire in August of 2018, which was actually captured by Sentinel-2 imagery. Check it out in Lens here. While much can't be seen with truecolor imagery, the SWIR, NIR layer makes it possible to identify which areas have burned and even areas that are currently on fire (the red blotches). Also, we encourage you to try 3D mode via the right toolbar, as that helps contextualize where the fire has spread. To learn more about infrared imagery and how it can be used, check out our support article, and to generate share links like the one you just viewed, see our sharing options.

HydroForecast

The latest news from HydroForecast. Get in touch at: team@hydroforecast.com.

The team has been hard at work on new developments. We're excited to share that HydroForecast just released version 3 (ST-3): the latest step change in forecasting 1-10 days ahead. Improvements include:

• Accuracy: ST-3 is more accurate in the 1-2 day ahead period than the current operational model, thanks to integration of a high-resolution weather forecast that resolves convective rainfall.
• Flexibility: ST-3 provides a novel advancement to integrate new data sources that have missing data and are of variable length. The win: easy experimentation with new data.
• Resiliency: Outages begone! ST-3 seamlessly works around delays from input data sources, ensuring the forecasts are delivered on time. 

This new model will be rolling out to our customers in the weeks ahead— if that's you, we'll be in-touch as we ready your new model.

The team also spent some time out-and-about, and we were featured at several events last quarter. We had a big showing at CEATI's annual Hydropower Conference, where our CEO Marshall Moutenot presented on the next big opportunities in AI. Engineering team member Phil Butcher spoke on a panel at Northwest Hydroelectric Association's annual conference that focused on the specific challenges and vulnerabilities facing hydro assets and how AI can mitigate them. And finally, HydroForecast received a shoutout from Denver Water during the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA)'s webinar titled "Incorporating AI into Water Utility Operations," organized by Upstream Tech Advisor and WaterValue President Paul Fleming, along with Blair Troutman from Blue Water Group. If we didn't catch you at these events, keep an eye out for upcoming conferences!

Looking ahead, join us on Wednesday April 10th for a webinar to learn how new machine learning and AI methods produce highly accurate and easy-to-use forecasts. There will be time for Q&A at the end of the session.

What We're Monitoring

Articles, podcasts, and news from the worlds around Lens and HydroForecast.

1. Apple's Restore Fund cultivates new roots in the Atlantic Forest. Apple recently shared an article that offers new insight and updates from its Restore Fund projects taking place in Brazil and Paraguay,  Apple uses Lens and other tools to support monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) for Restore Fund investments, including the projects in the Atlantic Forest. Read the story in Apple's newsroom here.
2. Denver Water Takes Climate Change Challenges Head On. Our partners at Denver Water were highlighted in a feature from Washington Park's The Profile for their track record of factoring in climate change since 2008 and for readily seeking and implementing new solutions that are holistic and multifaceted. Read the full story here.
3. A Deep Dive into Remote Monitoring for Forest Management. We couldn't have agreed more with this year's International Day of Forests theme: "Forests and Innovation: New Solutions for a Better World." We celebrated with a deep dive into how Lens can inform forest management, including use cases on baseline setting, tracking forest regrowth, and monitoring threats to forested landscapes. Check out the full article here.

More news from the team

We welcomed several new team members last quarter: 

• Aakriti Gupta, Director of Product Marketing
• Arohan Dutt, Software Engineer 
• Alison O'Neill, Lens Customer Success Manager
• Alan Andrews, HydroForecast Customer Success Manager
• Deandra Aversa, Enterprise Account Executive

That's all for now! Want to ensure that you're the first to receive these updates straight to your inbox? Sign up for our newsletter here and you'll never miss an update.

Cheers,

The Upstream Tech team