Offset-Landslide-Tracking-with-PlanetScope

Workflow for landslide displacement tracking using PlanetScope imagery and Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP), including image download, preprocessing, offset tracking, and visualization.

The notebook Sledenje_odmikov_pikslov_plazovi.ipynb includes:

• PlanetScope image search and download
• preprocessing
• offset tracking
• visualization of displacement results

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Requirements

• Planet API key
• AOI polygon/shapefile
• Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP)
• Conda

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Installation

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/EarthObservation/Offset-Tracking-with-PlanetScope-Data.git

Create the environment:

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate YOUR_ENV_NAME

Set your Planet API key:

1. Sign in to your Planet account.
2. Open Account -> My Settings.
3. Reveal and copy the value shown in the API Key section.

Export it in your shell before running the notebook:

export PL_API_KEY="your-planet-api-key"

To make it persistent across new shell sessions, add it to your shell profile (~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc):

echo 'export PL_API_KEY="your-planet-api-key"' >> ~/.bashrc  # use ~/.zshrc if you use zsh
source ~/.bashrc  # or: source ~/.zshrc

The notebook reads PL_API_KEY from the environment. If you prefer not to export it, it can also fall back to a local planet_api_key.txt file containing only the key, but using the environment variable is the recommended setup.

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Install Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP)

Download ASP:

wget https://github.com/NeoGeographyToolkit/StereoPipeline/releases/download/3.6.0/StereoPipeline-3.6.0-2025-12-26-x86_64-Linux.tar.bz2

Extract:

tar -xjf StereoPipeline-3.6.0-2025-12-26-x86_64-Linux.tar.bz2

Add ASP to PATH:

echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/StereoPipeline-3.6.0-2025-12-26-x86_64-Linux/bin' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Verify installation:

parallel_stereo --help

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Notes

This repository is intended as a research workflow for landslide monitoring using PlanetScope imagery and offset tracking techniques.

The notebook's Sledenje_odmikov_pikslov_plazovi.ipynb comments and variable names are partially written in Slovene, as the workflow was also developed for teaching purposes.

Helper modules from PlanetScope_landslide_tracking are vendored in planetscope_landslide_tracking/, so a separate helper repository clone is no longer required. The vendored helper code is distributed under its upstream MIT license in planetscope_landslide_tracking/LICENSE.

Citation

This workflow builds upon methods presented in: Mueting, A. and Bookhagen, B. (2024). Tracking slow-moving landslides with PlanetScope data: new perspectives on the satellite's perspective. Earth Surface Dynamics, 12, 1121–1143. https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-12-1121-2024