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Environmental crimes often occur in areas that are difficult to monitor and oversee. They happen in places too remote to patrol, in territories too vast to traverse on foot, against communities without resources to react.
This is the logic of dumping waste in a jungle river or cutting down a protected forest: the bet that no one will ever be able to document it. Satellite tasking, available through satellite data consultation at EOS Data Analytics, significantly reduces this monitoring limitation. The ability to command a satellite to photograph a specific point on demand, with a resolution of up to 30 centimeters, means that investigators can access satellite images almost in real-time within hours, instead of waiting weeks for any archival record that might exist.
The five cases below were publicly released by EOS Data Analytics itself, each with its own report on the company’s blog and portfolio — links are indicated case by case throughout the text. Together, they show what this capability does in practice: it transforms suspicion into documented evidence, capable of supporting investigative reports, complaints from affected communities, and ongoing legal processes.
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2,100 trucks, 36 hours non-stop, and 2.17 million kg of steel: Miami pours a sea of concrete to build the largest residential foundation in Florida under the 218-meter Bentley tower with car elevators to private garages in the sky.
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A man bought a friend’s house, was warned of a “secret” in the backyard, and dug almost 1 meter until he hit a metal lid: a fiberglass nuclear fallout shelter sealed since 1961, which he restored as an underground refuge at 22 °C year-round.
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Spanish owner lost an ancient pine tree during a storm, chose a 500-year-old olive tree and mobilized a crane and platform truck to move the 6-ton tree and transform the mountain chalet with living history and monumental landscaping.
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Mysterious object seen in images attributed to NASA on Columbia reappears in g1 video, shows structure near the edge of the Earth in 1996 and reignites doubts about space records without clear identification in space.
Malaysia: the plantations that were never planted
According to the case report published by EOS Data Analytics, Malaysian journalist Choon Chyuan Low suspected that palm oil plantations in the state of Pahang were a facade. The real business, he believed, was timber — extracted under the legal pretext of agricultural conversion, a kind of environmental laundering. Proving this was the hard part. Remote villages like Kampung Tanah Pindah depend on the surrounding forest but had no way to document the large-scale destruction.
The Pulitzer Center, which supported the investigation, connected Low with EOS Data Analytics, whose team compared time series of satellite images to measure the real extent of forest loss. According to the analysis released by the company, the images exposed the gap between the official discourse and reality: the forest cover had been removed, while much of the areas intended for palm oil cultivation showed no evidence of planting. The resulting report, “Timber Grab: The Truth Behind Pahang Oil Palm Plantations”, was published by the Malaysiakini portal in March 2024, with support from the Pulitzer Center, backed by this documentary evidence of satellite images.
Brazilian Amazon: mapping the advance of mining from orbit
For the Munduruku people of Pará, illegal gold mining not only caused deforestation but also environmental contamination by mercury, used by miners to extract gold and dumped into the water, fish, and ultimately, people. According to the case study released by EOS Data Analytics, a study by Fiocruz cited in the report found that 99% of the analyzed Munduruku population had mercury levels above the safe limit, with nearly three out of four people suffering neurological symptoms linked to contamination of the Tapajós River. According to the same report, by 2022, the reserve was the second most affected by illegal miners in Brazil, only behind the Kayapó territory, and illegal mining in the region had grown by 363% in just two years.
How to prove the extent of something hidden deep in the forest, accessible only by river or clandestine airstrip? EOS Data Analytics’ answer was to measure the space. Comparing a 1,900-hectare area with a 10-meter resolution between 2017 and 2022, researchers applied the NDVI index, which reads vegetation density. According to the results published by the company, 66 hectares of deforestation were detected during the period, the exposed soil areas identified in the images indicated the expansion of mining activity, and a new mine appeared clearly in the most recent image. The result was a quantifiable record of the mining advance, the kind that communities and organizations can present to Brazilian authorities and international human rights bodies.
Ecuador: recurrence of spills in the Coca River region
On April 7, 2020, according to the report published by EOS Data Analytics, a landslide ruptured three major pipelines in the upper Coca River region, in the San Rafael waterfall area. The oil flowed downstream to the Napo River and reached Peru, passing near protected areas. The headlines cooled down. Then, in 2022, the rivers turned black again. For the indigenous communities living on the banks, this was a pattern, not an accident — and the region’s unstable geology, prone to earthquakes, eruptions, and floods, makes new pipeline failures a question of when, not if.
Tracking years of accumulated damage over hundreds of kilometers of forest was beyond any ground team. EOS Data Analytics obtained high-resolution images of the San Rafael waterfall area and surrounding rivers, mapping where the contamination spread and documenting the stress the oil leaves on the vegetation. According to the company’s analysis, done with the NDVI index, vegetation in the area fell by 25% after the April 2020 spill. The analysis turned a dispute of versions about negligence into an objective and dated visual record.
Suriname: the Saamaka defend three hundred years of forest
According to the history published by EOS Data Analytics, the Saamaka descend from Africans who escaped slavery and established independent communities in the Suriname forest. A treaty signed on September 19, 1762, with the Dutch Crown recognized their territory, and a 2007 decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights reaffirmed these land rights. None of this stopped the machines: according to the same report, since January 2023, illegal roads and logging have advanced into the Saamaka territory, in violation of the Court’s decision. The company’s analysis, using Sentinel-2 satellite images between September 2021 and August 2023, measured the Palmeras road expanding from 4 to 42.7 kilometers in less than two years, with degradation spreading through the adjacent forest.
The forest is immense, and the Saamaka lack the resources to patrol it. EOS Data Analytics platforms allow leaders to detect deforestation almost in real-time, indicating where extraction is happening, how quickly the coverage is disappearing, and which areas are most threatened. For a community of about 115,000 people, according to the estimate cited by the company, facing well-funded logging interests, the power to order a new image of a suspicious clearing changes the game: “we think there’s extraction” becomes “here is exactly where, when, and how much.”
Tangier Island: watching the ground disappear
In Chesapeake Bay, USA, Tangier Island is shrinking, losing land to erosion and rising sea levels — until the question is no longer if the residents will leave but when. According to the case study published by EOS Data Analytics, the island has already lost about two-thirds of its area since 1850, when it was first mapped, and is sinking nearly 2 millimeters per year. The company gathered satellite images covering more than two decades to document this gradual loss of territory, tracing a coastline that recedes faster than any observer on land could keep up with — a record that, according to the report, can help residents decide where to reinforce the coast.
The satellite as a silent witness
What connects a poisoned Amazonian river, crops that were never planted, and a submerging island is not the scale of the damage. It is that, in all cases documented by EOS Data Analytics, the evidence was impossible to gather from the ground — and those causing the damage relied on that. A camera in orbit, directed at areas of interest, can provide dated and measurable visual records that were previously difficult or impossible to obtain, and that today support reports, complaints, and the monitoring by the affected communities themselves.
