Overview / Synopsis
ORBO Systems and the Natural Resources Conservancy (NRC) partnered with Makepath to design and implement an interactive platform that combines Planet satellite imagery with AI into a streamlined tool for conservation-easement monitoring. The ORBO platform helps land trusts make sure that land under conservation easements is being used appropriately, while reducing manual workflows that are costly and error prone.
Built through a user-centric process, ORBO gives users a single system of record for their portfolio of easements, automates detection of potentially unauthorized activities, simplifies annual reporting, and turns complex data into actionable workflows.
Background
Conservation easements are a mechanism to safeguard important land for future generations while providing valuable tax benefits. With conservation easements, landowners can protect their land’s natural or cultural values by agreeing to certain restrictions on its use, such as limits to development or logging.
Every easement is different, and monitoring conservation easements can be time-consuming, painstaking, and expensive. Historically, land trusts like NRC relied on in-person inspections and periodic reviews that combined a wide range of information like photos, emails, phone conversations, scanned deeds, conservation reports, and spreadsheets.
For NRC, writing the required annual reports became an especially severe bottleneck, for example. Onboarding new easements during the late-year reporting surge strained staff capacity.
NRC needed a scalable, lower-friction way to stay on top of changes to the property, check rules, and create compliance documentation, without adding headcount each season.
Project Description
Approach
It’s seductive to fall into the trap of putting technology first, especially when technology is advancing so fast and offers so many new functionalities and opportunities. The challenge with Orbo was to apply cutting-edge technology in a way that stakeholders would actually interact with it.
Makepath, ORBO Systems, and NRC began with discovery interviews and field-testing prototypes to keep the solution anchored in real tasks rather than “maps for maps’ sake.” Central to this approach was defining a primary user persona and focusing on their needs. With iterative, short sprints, we delivered usable features quickly, allowing for real-world feedback to shape development every step of the way.
Technology Used
At the center of ORBO’s user experience is the easement property, not the map. A searchable timeline organizes all activities and artifacts for each property. AI services work behind the scenes to extract information from deeds and conservation reports in different file formats, to summarize and consolidate information, or to analyze monthly satellite images for potential changes on the property. Guided workflows assist with annual reports and other common tasks.
Implementation Process
Based on user interviews and continuous feedback sessions, the teams mapped NRC’s workflows and processes end-to-end and focused on developing features tying into the highest-value points:
- Document ingestion and extraction to make deeds/BDRs searchable and structured.
- Connecting different management tools to a collaborative timeline so that landowner interactions, tasks, photos, and all kinds of events that occur are captured as durable records.
- Automatically procuring satellite images from Planet on a regular cadence and analyzing these images for potentially relevant changes.
- Report generation that compiles information from disparate data sources into standardized PDFs.
All of ORBO’s features are tied together in a user-friendly interface that puts real-life workflows front and center.
Key Results
- Faster reporting; fewer late-season crunches. In the words of Trevor Moore, Director of Conservation Stewardship for NRC: “Aggregating everything into one report was laborious and time-consuming. Now with Orbo, report generation feels smooth and painless.
- Greater scalability across a growing portfolio. Orbo reduces the need to add staff solely for monitoring and reporting workloads, a critical factor for non-profits with variable funding.
- A single source of truth that improved collaboration. Abby Hoffman, NRC’s Director of Operations: “What began as a tool for one person has become the center of how we operate our organization.
- Earlier visibility into potential violations. Automated change alerts tied to additional data, such as building envelopes, enable focused follow-up instead of broad, manual review.
- User-first adoption. Because the system mirrors real workflows (events, inspections, owner interactions) rather than forcing GIS-heavy steps, adoption is rapid and durable.
- Governance and auditability. Standardized reports and searchable timelines help teams respond to audits and track interactions across an easement’s lifecycle.
Conclusion
ORBO uses cutting-edge AI and earth observation technology in a way that puts users and their workflows before the technology itself. With ORBO, NRC moved from scattered files and manual reviews to repeatable, auditable workflows. The result is not just efficiency, it is confidence that the promise of land stewardship can be kept, even as portfolios grow.
Company Contact: Makepath
