For decades, sensors have been collecting data about our planet. Yet complex global systems like agriculture, deforestation, water cycles, and many others, affect billions but are still poorly understood. Not only are these systems critical to understand for the good of humanity, they’re also important for businesses as they adapt to — and attempt to thrive in — an ever-changing environment.

We are seeing an exponential rise in the number of real-world sensors, producing ever more data. Combining multiple sources provides a far richer view than that of any single data source. To harness this power and enable global-scale computation, it’s necessary to have a data refinery that combines data from diverse sources, cleans it up and makes it ready for modeling – and a platform to upon which to build living, learning models. That’s exactly what we’ve built at Descartes Labs.