Case Study - Boreal Canada
Monitoring the Northwestern Ontario boreal
Northwestern Ontario holds one of the largest intact boreal forests on the planet - a carbon sink, a watershed, and the ancestral territory of dozens of First Nations. It is also under growing pressure from industrial logging, mining access roads, and an intensifying wildfire season.
The challenge
Local stewardship teams cover territories larger than many European countries with a handful of field staff. By the time disturbance is spotted on the ground, it is often weeks or months old - too late to intervene, and too coarse to feed into reporting for funders or regulators.
What we deployed
- Weekly optical and SAR change-detection over priority watersheds, with sub-hectare alert resolution.
- A simple dashboard for community monitors - map, alert feed, and a downloadable evidence pack per event.
- Reforestation verification on partner restoration plots, comparing canopy growth against a multi-year baseline.
Early outcomes
Pilot partners are now seeing disturbance events within days instead of months, and producing audit-grade evidence for grant reporting without hiring an external GIS team. The same pipeline is being extended to track post-fire regrowth across the 2023-2025 burn scars.
What's next
We are scaling the Northwestern Ontario deployment with additional First Nations partners and integrating community-collected ground truth back into the model - so the people closest to the land shape what the satellites learn to see.
Working on a similar territory? We'd love to talk.
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