CONSTRUCTION · HOW THE API WORKS

Construction

Know the groundbefore you pour concrete.

PART 01

How and where it can be used?

The everyday construction jobs the score is used for.

15 REAL SITUATIONS

Fifteen everyday construction decisions this score is used for.

01

Shortlisting a plot to build on

Compare candidate sites in minutes and drop the ones with bad slope or wet ground before paying for a survey.

02

Pre-feasibility for a housing project

Know the earthworks and drainage story before the layout and budget are locked.

03

Planning a road, rail or pipeline route

Score points along the whole corridor and reroute early around unstable or flood-prone ground.

04

Siting a factory or warehouse

Confirm the ground is flat and firm enough for heavy floors and machinery before committing capital.

PART 02

What's new?

The legacy pre-construction workflow, and what Rootfifteen actually replaces.

THE LEGACY WORKFLOW

How traditional land surveys still work today.

A four-phase, ground-heavy process that burns weeks before a single design decision is made.

  1. 1–3 weeks

    Phase 1: Manual Record Collection

    Surveyors manually retrieve paper cadastral and revenue maps from local government offices. Early dispute or encumbrance identification is slow and fragmented.

    Pain point: Records are often outdated, physically degraded, or held across different offices.

  2. 3–8 weeks

    Phase 2: Ground-First Field Deployment

    Engineering crews carry Total Stations and DGPS receivers to establish benchmarks, measure elevations, and mark boundaries on-site.

    Pain point: Labour-intensive, expensive, weather-dependent, and physically slow across vast or harsh terrain.

  3. 1–2 weeks

    Phase 3: Topographical Mapping & Processing

    Raw field data, drone orthophotos and point-cloud data are imported into legacy GIS software by technicians to build contours and slope profiles.

    Pain point: High human overhead, error-prone manual vectorisation, and data locked inside expert teams.

  4. Manual review

    Phase 4: Risk & Constraint Analysis

    Project managers cross-reference spatial maps against environmental zones, flood basins and legal boundaries to check Right-of-Way feasibility.

    Pain point: Major risks are often discovered after large sums have already been spent on preliminary engineering.

WHAT ROOTFIFTEEN REPLACES

70–80% of pre-construction due diligence.

We do not eliminate surveyors — we eliminate the manual, expensive guesswork that happens before heavy equipment arrives.

Site & Route Feasibility
4–8 weeks of physical field visits and manual mapping.
Automated satellite remote-sensing and multi-temporal vector analysis.
Fully replaced — delivered in minutes.
Terrain & Elevation Profiling
Manual Total Station / DGPS levelling across the site.
Automated spatial DEM/DTM terrain extraction and slope scoring.
Fully replaced for preliminary engineering.
Constraint & Risk Scoring
Manual cross-referencing of environmental and flood data.
Automated algorithmic risk scoring for flood, slope and land cover.
Fully replaced.
Cadastral Overlay
Manual paper-to-digital alignment by GIS engineers.
Automated vector matching of land parcels onto satellite imagery.
75% automated.
Final Legal Boundary Marking
Physical pegging on-site using DGPS / Total Station.
Physical ground validation by site engineers.
Not replaced — ground-truth execution.
Geotechnical Testing
Sub-surface soil drilling and boreholes.
Sub-surface soil drilling and boreholes.
Not replaced — physical physics.

We replace 70% to 80% of the friction in pre-construction due diligence. Traditionally, an EPC firm has to send field teams with DGPS receivers and Total Stations to scout vast tracts of land for weeks just to answer basic feasibility questions: Is this route viable? What is the terrain risk? Are there environmental or parcel conflicts? Rootfifteen shifts that entire preliminary phase into an automated software workflow. Our V2 engine ingests heavy remote-sensing and vector data to deliver instant risk scoring, terrain analysis and land intelligence right at the pre-bidding stage. We do not replace the final physical pegging or soil testing on the ground — we replace the weeks of manual, expensive guesswork that EPC firms currently endure before they lay a single foundation.

TRADITIONAL VS ROOTFIFTEEN

How this was done before — and what changes.

Screening a candidate site
Commission a walkover survey and wait weeks for a report.
Score the coordinate in seconds and reject obvious georisk first.
Slope and relief
Estimated from contour maps or eyeballed on site.
Measured from a global DEM with a five-point stencil.
Flood and saturation
Inferred from historical anecdote or coarse hazard zoning.
Observed directly in current Sentinel-2 water and moisture indices.
Seconds, not weeks

A live read while you are still in the meeting.

Any coordinate on Earth

No site visit, no imagery contract.

Fully explainable

Every score breaks down into measured values.

PART 03

How it works?

You send a coordinate. We read live satellite and climate data. You get one score back.

THE FLOW

Five steps, every request.

  1. 01
    Input
    lat / lng + mode: construction
  2. 02
    Observe
    Terrain, surface and hazard sampling
  3. 03
    Derive
    Buildability signals
  4. 04
    Fuse
    Weighted, deterministic model
  5. 05
    Output
    0–100 score + band + components
Same coordinate → same score, every time.

Built on open Sentinel-2, Copernicus DEM, NASA POWER and USGS data — read live at your coordinate, never copied from a nearby area.

DATA SOURCES

Four open data streams, one score.

Sentinel-2 L2A

10–20 m multispectral imagery for surface state, water and built-up fraction.

Copernicus DEM GLO-90

~90 m global elevation for slope, relief and terrain stability.

NASA POWER

Rainfall, temperature and solar regime used for drainage and workability signals.

USGS Earthquake Catalog

Recorded seismic events within 200 km over the last five years.

INPUTS

Three fields in. That is the whole input.

latnumber

Latitude in decimal degrees. Use the plot centroid, a proposed foundation point, or an interval along a corridor.

lngnumber

Longitude in decimal degrees.

mode"construction"

Construction mode weights terrain and georisk most heavily and treats dense vegetation as clearance cost rather than a positive.

REQUEST
POST /api/public/v1/land-intel/assess
{
  "latitude": 19.0760,
  "longitude": 72.8777,
  "mode": "construction"
}
RESPONSE
200 OK
{
  "status": "ok",
  "engine": "land-intel.v1",
  "mode": "construction",
  "rootfifteenScore": 68.4,
  "classification": "Margin caution",
  "components": {
    "terrain": 61,
    "georisk": 72,
    "surface": 74,
    "climate": 80
  },
  "observations": {
    "elevationM": 14, "slopePercent": 6.4,
    "localReliefM": 22, "ndwi": 0.09,
    "ndbi": 0.12, "seismicEvents5yr": 3
  },
  "verticalMetrics": [
    { "key": "foundation stability",
      "label": "Foundation stability",
      "value": 61, "display": "61 / 100",
      "band": "Standard footings" }
  ],
  "generatedAt": "2026-07-11T12:04:22Z"
}
THE OUTPUTS

What you get back.

Exactly what the live demo report shows for a coordinate:

  • 1The Rootfifteen score, 0–100, for the exact coordinate.
  • 2The classification band that goes with it, from Stable to Critical hazard.
  • 3Four component sub-scores: terrain, georisk, surface and climate.
  • 4Construction indicators: foundation stability, earthwork burden, flood and drainage exposure, substrate wetness, seismic design demand, site clearance load, existing built context and weather workability window.
  • 5Every raw measured value behind those indicators, exactly as the API returns it.
  • 6A written summary of what the numbers mean for the site.
  • 7A PDF of the whole report.
Try the live demo
WHAT THE NUMBER MEANS

What the number means.

Every response carries a classification alongside the score. The score ranges from 0 to 100; these are the exact bands the API returns for construction.

80–100
Stable
Greenlight for heavy structures with standard contingency.
60–79
Margin caution
Buildable with design attention to slope, drainage or seismic loading.
40–59
Engineering review
Commission geotechnical work before committing capital.
NEXT STEP

Now try it in your own stack.

Tell us what you are building and we will send you endpoint docs, a key, and limits that fit your use case.