We're volunteer driven and currently rely on personal donations, so we're scrappy. We could probably justify somewhere in the region of $10k/yr. The jets/balloon angle is interesting, thanks - hadn't occurred to me, and I'll search through what's out there.

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marklit 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

See if you can negotiate reselling the imagery they sell you. It might be hard to get agreement with this as the vendor will have you both as a customer and compeditor but if you pull it off, you could recoup your costs and then some. For a few weeks, no one else in the private sector will have the freshness and/or quality of imagery you do.

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embedding-shape 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The jets/balloon angle is interesting

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but what about drones? Probably would have to get permits most likely, but still might be cheaper than alternatives (although balloons are hard to beat when it comes to costs, not always reusable though).

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smallerfish 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We do use a drone when we know of a site where deforestation has taken place. The gap we're trying to fill is early detection of forest intervention, so that we can alert appropriate agencies (who are generally under-resourced) and get an inspection to take place while activity is ongoing.

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marklit 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Drones (and helicopters) do have their market as well. A lot of engineering firms I saw would go with one of these two, depending on the situation.

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Scoundreller 4 hours ago | parent [-]

How many years away are we from a cheap drone that will takeoff, land, solar recharge, repeat until it returns to you a few weeks later with a few tb of SD cards of high res imagery?

	▲	notahacker 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A lot of the barriers are regulatory in the Western world. In rainforests you might not have to worry about that, but there aren't many shade free spots to land