Batch access and processing of PlanetScope imagery for spatiotemporal analysis in R • BatchPlanet

BatchPlanet is an R package designed to automate workflows for downloading, processing, and visualizing remote sensing imagery in batch from the Planet API. Originally developed to study tree phenology Song et al., (2025), the package has been generalized for broader environmental applications. It provides a suite of tools to:

Download Data: Retrieve PlanetScope images across multiple sites over time.
Process Data: Extract reflectance time series, calculate vegetation indices (e.g., Enhanced Vegetation Index), and estimate start/end of season.
Visualize Data: Generate interactive true color maps and time series plots.

Features

Batch Data Retrieval: Download data over a large area (e.g., several cities) and a long time window (e.g., 2017 to current).
High-Performance Capabilities: Optimized for HPC environments with parallel processing support.
Interactive Visualizations: Create interactive true-color imagery gallery and time series plots.
Robust Processing Tools: Provide generalizable nonparameteric time series analysis tools (e.g., weighted Whittaker smoothing, threshold-based start/end of season metrics estimation).

Installation

Install the stable version from R-Universe:

install.packages('BatchPlanet', repos = c('https://yiluansong.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

Install the development version from GitHub:

# Install devtools if not already installed
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("zhulabgroup/BatchPlanet")

This package was developed and tested using the rocker/geospatial:4.2.0-2023-04-25 Docker image, with RStudio 2024.04.01 and GCC 10.3.0.

Examples and documentation

For complete guides on using all features of BatchPlanet, please explore our package vignettes:

Getting started workflow: A complete, step-by-step example demonstrating how to download PlanetScope data and process time series.
Customization and advanced usage: Advanced configurations for tailoring the processing pipeline to specific research needs.
Miscellaneous time series processing tools: Two generalizable tools for time series analysis.

Full documentation of functions can be found on the Reference page.

Testing

We have developed testthat unit tests covering all core functions.

# from within R or RStudio, with your working directory set to the package root
devtools::test()

Citation

To cite this package in publications use:

Song Y, Bevington A, Reid K, Zhu J, Liu Y, Zhu K (2025). BatchPlanet: Batch access and processing of PlanetScope imagery for spatiotemporal analysis in R. R package version 0.1.0, https://github.com/zhulabgroup/BatchPlanet.

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Manual{,
    title = {BatchPlanet: Batch access and processing of PlanetScope imagery for spatiotemporal analysis in R},
    author = {Yiluan Song and Alexandre R. Bevington and Ken Reid and Jiali Zhu and Yi Liu and Kai Zhu},
    year = {2025},
    note = {R package version 0.1.0},
    url = {https://github.com/zhulabgroup/BatchPlanet},
  }

Community Guidelines

We welcome contributions from the community to help improve BatchPlanet.

If you would like to contribute code, fix a bug, or suggest a new feature, please:

Fork the repository.
Create a new branch for your changes. We recommend following the Tidyverse Style Guide for R code.
Submit a Pull Request (PR) detailing your changes.

If you encounter a bug or have a suggestion for improvement, please open an issue in the GitHub Issue Tracker. Please provide a minimal reproducible example (reprex) if reporting a bug.

If you have questions regarding the usage of the package or need help with a specific workflow, please contact the maintainer, Yiluan Song, at songyl@umich.edu.

Planned Features (Coming Soon)

The following features are planned for future releases of BatchPlanet:

Polygon support: Ability to use polygons (or multiple polygons) as the area of interest (AOI) for ordering, downloading, and extracting data, in addition to points.
Band math and raster processing tools: Integration with the Planet Orders API’s processing tools (such as band math, clip, harmonize, reproject, tile, and more) to allow on-the-fly calculation of indices (e.g., NDVI, EVI) and other raster operations before download. See Planet Orders API Tools documentation.
Option to run in series: Ability to choose between parallel and serial (series) processing for workflows where parallelization is not desired or possible.

Have a feature request? Please open an issue or discussion!

Enjoy exploring and analyzing remote sensing data with BatchPlanet! 🚀