BasinPulse

Making Basin Health Visible from Space Pixel-verified river basin intelligence for the enterprise Satellite-powered basin health intelligence for corporate water stewardship

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Description

💎 Idea

BasinPulse helps companies understand whether their water protection efforts are actually working using satellite data as independent, objective evidence.

Many large companies rely on crops like strawberries, almonds, citrus, and rice that come from river basins under real pressure. Water levels are dropping, ecosystems are degrading, and long term supply is at risk. To respond, companies invest in local projects: restoring wetlands, replanting riverbanks, improving irrigation efficiency. These initiatives are expensive and important.

The problem is that no one can clearly show whether they’re making a difference.

Right now, progress is tracked through occasional site visits, manual surveys, and reports that companies often produce themselves. It’s slow, inconsistent, and hard to verify.

At the same time, new regulations and frameworks like Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), Science Based Targets Network, and Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures are raising the bar. Companies now need to provide measurable, independently verified evidence that their water projects are delivering real impact, not just proof that money was spent.

BasinPulse fills that gap.

Companies tell us which river basins their supply chains depend on and where their projects are located. From there, we automatically pull and analyze years of satellite data for those areas. We track how water availability is changing, how water quality is evolving, and how the surrounding ecosystems are holding up.

All of this is combined into a single Basin Health Score that updates continuously, not just once a year.

When a project begins, we establish a clear baseline. As it progresses, we show what’s changed. The result is straightforward, before and after evidence based on satellite data, delivered without the need for consultant reports or manual verification.

The key idea is simple: satellites are already capturing images of every river basin on Earth every few days. The data is there. It just hasn’t been translated into the kind of clear, credible impact evidence that sustainability teams now need.

🛰️ EU Space Technologies

BasinPulse is built on free, open-access European satellite infrastructure.

Sentinel-2 is an optical satellite that photographs the Earth's surface at 10-metre resolution every five days. We use it to measure how much surface water is present in a basin and whether it is growing or shrinking over time. We also use it to track vegetation health along riverbanks recovering riparian zones are a clear sign that a restoration project is working. Finally, we use it to detect changes in water colour that indicate algae growth or turbidity, which are early signs of water quality stress.

Sentinel-1 uses radar instead of a camera, so it works even through clouds and rain, important for basins in wet climates or during storm seasons. We use it to measure soil moisture, which is an early warning signal for drought before a basin visibly dries out.

Copernicus Climate Data Store (ERA5) gives us decades of historical rainfall data for every basin. This matters because we need to separate the effect of a company's restoration project from the effect of a dry year or an unusually wet season. If a basin improves, we want to be able to say whether that is because of the stewardship work or simply because it rained more.

Galileo and EGNOS provide precise location data for project sites, farm facilities, and monitoring points inside a basin. This lets us link what the satellite sees at a specific location to the specific project a company invested in there, turning a satellite observation into auditable impact evidence.

💧 Challenges Addressed

Primary: Challenge 1 - Securing Equitable and Efficient Access to Water

Corporate water stewardship programs exist to restore and protect water access in the basins most under pressure but right now companies have no way to know if their investments are working. BasinPulse makes that measurable. By showing continuously which interventions are improving basin health and which are not, it helps companies direct future investment where it actually has impact making the system more efficient and the outcomes more equitable for the communities and ecosystems that depend on those basins.

Secondary: Challenge 3 - Disaster Risk Monitoring

The same indicators we track for stewardship. declining soil moisture, shrinking surface water, vegetation stress, are also the earliest warning signs of drought. As a side effect of running continuously, BasinPulse functions as an early alert system for the sourcing regions most exposed to water scarcity and flood risk.