What are Disturbance Alerts?
Disturbance Alerts (DIST-ALERTs) are a service offered by Restor to help site managers detect and track changes to land and vegetation in near real-time. If something is happening to your site, whether that's agricultural expansion, logging, mining, fire, drought, or a landslide, DIST-ALERTs are designed to flag it.
Reports are generated at a 30-metre resolution, meaning even relatively small disturbances can be picked up. They can be used for compliance monitoring, enforcement, site management, and mitigation planning.
How does it work?
DIST-ALERTs are built on satellite data from the NASA OPERA project, which combines imagery from two satellites: Landsat and Sentinel-2. Together, they cover most of the globe and revisit the same area every 2 to 4 days in the tropics and roughly every other day in temperate zones.
Because the satellites use visible-range imagery, cloud cover can affect the revisit rate. Once imagery is captured, it's processed within 2 to 3 days to produce maps of vegetation change.
To decide whether a change is a genuine disturbance, the system compares current vegetation cover against the previous 3 years of data (using a 15-day window to account for seasonal variation). Any significant difference is flagged as an anomaly. These anomalies are then tracked across multiple observations to build confidence. Only high-confidence, confirmed anomalies make it into your DIST-ALERT report.
What will I receive?
When your report is ready, you'll get two things: an email notification and a full report.
Email notification
The email gives you a quick summary so you can assess at a glance whether anything needs attention:
The percentage of your site affected by disturbances (if any)
A severity rating for the disturbance: low, medium, or high
A link to the full report for more detail
Full report
The full report goes into depth on what was detected:
Total area and percentage of your site with confirmed disturbances in the monitoring period
A cumulative disturbance map showing exactly where disturbances were detected
A timeline showing the first and last disturbance maps within the monitoring period, alongside the corresponding satellite images
A temporal analysis showing when disturbance events occurred over time
There are two levels of detail available. DIST-ALERT Light shows a count of disturbance events over time. DIST-ALERT Full provides a complete timeline of every event with both the disturbance map and satellite imagery for each.
All maps and imagery can be downloaded from the report and used in desktop GIS tools for further analysis if needed.
Free trial and how to request a report
We're currently offering a two-month free trial of DIST-ALERTs. During the trial, reports are delivered at no cost and sent monthly, on the 1st of each month, from the point your account is set to active.
To get started, fill in the request form below. It collects the information we need to set up monitoring for your site and someone from the team will be in touch to confirm your access.
Pricing note: We're still working out the commercial structure beyond the trial period and will be in touch with details before anything changes.
Sample report
Below is a sample DIST-ALERT report so you can see exactly what to expect. Thanks to Andrew for putting this together.
Here are a few screenshots of the report to give you a better idea of what to expect, an example of the DIST-ALERT full timeline with an example event is shown below:
DIST-ALERT full timeline
Email notification:
Full report:
Example event:
Data sources and citation
路 Nguyen, T.H. et al. (2025). OPERA DIST-ALERT: Near-real-time disturbance detection in HLS satellite images. Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64014-9
路 OPERA Land Surface Disturbance Alert from Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 product (Version 1) from https://registry.opendata.aws/nasa-operal3dist-alert-hlsv1.
路 Landsat imagery courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey
路 Sentinel-2 imagery courtesy of ESA/Copernicus