How Montrose achieved 90% time savings and entered new markets by switching to AirSage data

About Montrose Environmental Group

Montrose Environmental Group helps answer the question, “Is there a better way to conduct environmental decision-making?” Their partners range from energy to real estate to local government and poultry production. They combine subject matter expertise of economics and ecology with the latest technology and analytical tools to continually push the envelope on best practices and approaches. Andrew Bechard is a senior economist on the Ecosystem Service Economics Team. He helps clients understand the value of their environmental assets by conducting advanced analytics to derive their non-market value. 

Challenge

Before AirSage, data collection at Montrose was labor intensive, cost intensive, and time intensive. The team had to physically go to a recreational site and count by hand for months on end. It involved a huge amount of coordination upfront and time and money. In general, the company could only focus on a few jobs at a time because it was so invested on data collection. One of the biggest questions was: “How do we grow while at the same time helping our current clients?”

Decision

Knowing the issues the company was facing with data collection, Andrew and his team began looking for alternatives. After doing an extensive literature review, they discovered AirSage in peer reviewed literature published by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and were excited to see what AirSage could offer. Initially, Andrew asked for a sample dataset from AirSage, as he wanted to ensure the data was reliable. After review, he saw that AirSage data tracked well with his onsite data. In fact, it was an 85% correlation over 4.5 years and hundreds of miles, which was a level of accuracy that was unheard of in the space. This result proved to Montrose that AirSage data was trustworthy, and they could rely on it moving forward.

When asked why AirSage stood out from the other location data providers, Andrew explained, "Besides the accuracy of their data, it was the helpfulness (AirSage) provided upfront.



Results

Now that Montrose is using AirSage data, the spatial and temporal difficulties of data collection are gone. They can retrieve data for thousands of miles of a site, and for each day in a multi-year time period. And, it only takes a matter of weeks. Because of the time and cost savings, they are able to enter new market segments that they could not have accessed before. Andrew explains, “It went from ‘what are we going to do to get data?' to 'what can we do with all the data we have?' We went from not having anything to having everything possible at once.”

Time savings

AirSage delivers data within weeks which is a 90% time savings compared to multiple months of onsite counting.

More spatial-temporal coverage

Montrose receives greater sample sizes and broader spatiotemporal coverage with AirSage compared to onsite data.

New market segments

Montrose can now enter new market segments due to the time and cost savings from using AirSage data.
"AirSage knew the data inside and out. They were willing to answer our advanced complex questions, and we didn’t see that anywhere else.”
- Andrew Bechard, Montrose Environmental Group

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