Welcome to Lens

Navigate to the  settings menu , where you'll see a button to invite other users to your account. Choose the permission level you'd like each user to have. User settings can always be configured by Admin users from the Team list.

Once you have your imagery, click around and see if anything is appearing differently than you'd expect. Once you find an area of change or something you'd like to annotate, you can  create a note  that will include the relevant location and the imagery you're viewing.

Once you create a note, it will be added to the sidepane where you'll see observations saved by your colleagues. You can also attach a photo to your note if you have documentation from a field visit to supplement the remote data.

When it comes to detecting changes over time, comparing two images is always better than looking at one. In Lens you can use  Compare Mode , which allows you to compare two images side-by-side. Give it a try below.

Truecolor imagery is great for monitoring properties at a glance, but satellites collect lots of data that we can't see with our naked eye. With Lens, that data can be synthesized to shed light on ground conditions.

The  Analyze Area tool  allows you to easily visualize seasonal patterns and year-over-year changes in ecological conditions. The tool uses high-frequency Sentinel-2 data that comes into Lens every 5 days or so, making it a great way to narrow down the time window of when a particular change has happened.

On the right, Analyze Area is being used to narrow down the time window of when forestry work occurred. Once that date range is determined, commercial imagery could be ordered to spot equipment and associated impacts.

The Analyze Area tool can be used to evaluate trends in vegetation, water, and other data layers offered in Lens.

Along with the red, green, and blue bands used to create the truecolor layers, we also pull other bands from our public imagery sources. We call these Index Layers, and they can show vegetation vigor, surface water, surface moisture, and snow.

These layers are available on a weekly time scale, in the case of Sentinel-2 data, and less frequently for NAIP data. Keep in mind that NAIP imagery only covers the United States.

You can view Index Layers in compare mode, which is a great way to see changes in ground conditions at a glance. When monitoring for forestry activity, cleared areas may show a decrease in green color values to correspond with the drop in photosynthetic activity. Monitoring a beaver restoration area may show higher levels of surface moisture as the hydrology of an area changes. These observations can be saved as notes for documenting and reporting.

Hop into  Lens  and start exploring! You can't break anything, so click around and start checking out your areas of interest.

As questions come up, our  Knowledge Base  has all of the answers you're looking for. From the Portfolio Overview page, you can open the help beacon to get quick answers to your questions. Or, you can click on your name in the top right corner and navigate to our support docs from there.

If you aren't finding the answers to your questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us at lens@upstream.tech. Happy monitoring and welcome to Lens!