Thank you so much for you support!

We are not doing that at the moment but would love to hear more about it.

Do the shots include oceans and seas as well and would ships be visible on those shots?

I'm asking because Sea Shepherd could not continue an anti-whaling campaign because they were technologically overmatched: http://www.themercury.com.au/news/politics/sea-shepherd-anno...

Planet does not image the ocean in its entirety due to the difficulty in geo-referencing (pre-user imagery processing pipelines use ground control points, usually just shiny objects with a known location, to locate the image on the earth, and this is hard in the ocean), but they do image focal regions for purposes similar to those you mention (vessel identification + tracking). I'd also imagine this choice has something to do with preserving satellite operational lifespan (can turn cameras off when not being used).

https://www.planet.com/products/open-water-monitoring/

I can ask, but I assume so. The guy I spoke with was doing things like algorthmically measuring shadow angles on crude oil storage tank covers to determine supply stocks and then selling that data to commodities traders. They were able to get incredible detail along with really robust processing of huge datasets.

Doesn't NASA have a dedicated satellite with API access for this type of data? (Monitoring weather, tracking deforestation, crop changes, etc). I believe its called VIIRS

I recall seeing it on mark robers "is nasa a waste of money" video here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lARpY0nIQx0&vl=en

Does planet.com use that data or the company you have in mind use it?

They have an array of their own satellites that circle the earth and get an aggregate photo of the entire planet about once every 24 hours.

NPR's "Planet Money" podcast did an interesting series about satellites which featured this company, "Planet". https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/12/01/567267573/plan...

What company is this if you dont mind saying?

I assume he is talking about Planet Labs (https://www.planet.com/) - a very cool service.

Do you happen to know what the pricing looks like?

Representative pricing for multiple sources including Planet's RapidEye: http://www.landinfo.com/satellite-imagery-pricing.html

Purchasing a before and after image of a specific logging site isn't cheap once you've factored in minimum order sizes, but it isn't unaffordable. Purchasing images to look at deforestation on a national scale (if you're looking at individual trees, not woods; open data will give you the latter) is millions of dollars per annum, but worked very well where tried to prevent illegal vegetation clearing in Australia.

Yes, this is it as far as I can tell.

My guess is likely Planet.

https://www.planet.com/products/