Rehabilitation monitoring
A satellite time series that shows whether vegetation is actually recovering on a rehabilitated footprint — year on year, benchmarked against ground you can point to, and documented so the next reviewer can follow every step.
What a satellite time series can establish
Vegetation rehabilitation is a claim about change over time: bare, disturbed ground becoming stable, vegetated land. That is exactly what a satellite archive records. Working from open Sentinel-2 and Landsat imagery — with a UAV survey added where the footprint is small or the detail matters — TerraX reconstructs how vegetation vigour and cover on your site have moved across the years, including years before anyone thought to start monitoring.
The output is a documented, repeatable record: vegetation indices tracked per season, mapped across the footprint, with the method and its uncertainty written down rather than asserted.
Measured against a reference, not an absolute number
A vegetation index has no universal pass mark. A figure that means recovery in a highveld grassland means bare ground in a subtropical one. So the useful comparison is not against a fixed threshold — it is against an adjacent, undisturbed reference area under the same rainfall, geology and season. When the rehabilitated footprint tracks the reference, that is evidence of recovery that survives scrutiny. When it lags, the gap is quantified rather than argued.
Why annual re-runs cost almost nothing
The expensive part is building the pipeline the first time — defining the site and reference boundaries, selecting cloud-free scenes, validating the indices, documenting the method. Once that exists, each subsequent year is a re-run against the same baseline. That makes annual rehabilitation monitoring — and the management decisions it supports — genuinely affordable for a closure plan or an environmental authorisation, and it means every year is measured the same way as the last.
The boundary, stated plainly
This layer describes condition and change — not cause. It can show that a section of the footprint is not recovering as the reference is. It cannot, on its own, tell you why: seed mix, compaction, slope, herbivory and rainfall all live in the ground record. Attribution needs that record alongside the imagery. Saying so is not a weakness in the evidence; it is what keeps the evidence defensible.
The same pipeline, beyond rehabilitation
This method reads any managed vegetated area, not only mine rehabilitation. We package it for estates, golf courses, plantations and campuses as greenspace reporting, and for farms and irrigation schemes as crop monitoring.
Rehabilitation monitoring — common questions
What does satellite rehabilitation monitoring actually measure?
Vegetation condition and change over time, read against an undisturbed reference area under the same geology, rainfall and season — not an absolute pass mark. It describes condition and change, not their cause.
Can it prove a site was successfully rehabilitated?
It provides defensible evidence of the vegetation trajectory against a controlled reference. Whether that meets a closure standard is a judgement for the responsible practitioners; the imagery supplies the evidence, not the sign-off on adequacy.
How far back can recovery be measured?
The open archive reaches back well before most monitoring programmes began — Sentinel-2 from 2015 and Landsat for decades — so a trajectory can be reconstructed even where ground monitoring started late.
Is a high-resolution drone not better?
For inspecting fine detail, drones earn their place. But a standard RGB camera is blind to the near-infrared and red-edge signals that actually indicate vegetation health; the backbone of rehabilitation evidence is a validated, multi-year spectral time series.
Related insights
Have a footprint to monitor?
Tell us the site, the rehabilitation timeline and what the report has to support. Reply within one working day.