“It is a game changer for people who want to know the impact of a management action on particular piece of land, or how a dam affected the downstream area.”

“We have recognized for the first time that we’re not just going to do one more, then stop, but that Landsat is actually a long-term monitoring activity, like the weather satellites, that should go on in perpetuity.”

“Many of our customers’ work couldn’t be done without Landsat.”

“New sensors are nice, but can’t let us see back in time. Happy 17th!”

“You need decades of data to say that a change in kelp is due to climate change rather than other cyclical factors, with Landsat, we have those data.”

“Landsat was really a time machine for us.”

“The 30-year record of the Landsat sensors (i.e. TM, ETM+, and OLI) provides a unique data archive for studying the impacts of climate change on ecosystems worldwide, in our case, coastal marshes.”

“When fighting broke out, the [New York Times] graphics team pulled up images from [the] Landsat 8 satellite to look for changes on the ground.”

“We are learning more about cool things to do with Landsat at a faster rate than anytime in the past.”

“By establishing baseline knowledge of Earth’s land areas throughout the last half-century, Landsat allows scientists to evaluate environmental change over time, to better understand the drivers and impacts of change, to model and predict future changes, and to chart these changes in the form of maps.”

“Giant kelp forests are especially sensitive to environmental changes and have a history of undergoing abrupt, dramatic declines and increases in response to a variety of climatic and human-induced factors. The application of our remote sensing methods to the long-term (continuous since 1984), high frequency (~ once per month) global coverage of Landsat imagery is providing a unique opportunity for studying these dynamics over spatial and temporal scales t…

“This research was only possible thanks to the free and open Landsat data policy.”