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(Jan 2016) For the first time, UrtheCast imagery is now available for use on an environmental monitoring platform. From day one, UrtheCast’s vision has been firmly rooted in the concept of planet stewardship, aiming to provide people with the tools needed to change the world. This week, we mark an important step along that journey.

By opening up its API, UrtheCast has made it possible for Global Forest Watch (GFW) to incorporate high-resolution UrtheCast imagery into the GFW monitoring platform, helping people study changes in forests across the planet. As reported by GFW, about 30 percent of the globe is covered in forest, and high-res satellite imagery — like that provided by UrtheCast — remains a key factor in the effective monitoring of that forested land.

In partnership with GFW, UrtheCast offers imagery from three sensors, for free: UrtheCast’s 5m-res sensor, Theia, UrtheCast’s Deimos-1 satellite, and NASA’s Landsat 8. The entirety of this data is pulled from the UrtheCast API. Currently available on the GFW platform is imagery acquired between 2013 and 2016; an archive that is continuously updated with newly acquired imagery.

Already, UrtheCast data has been used to confirm the results of a University of Maryland study, proving that clearing for rubber plantations has severely degraded Cambodia’s once widespread forests

To learn more about the use of UrtheCast data on the GFW platform, visit the Global Forest Watch blog, or email us at media@urthecast.com.

(Jan 12 2016) Considering the worldwide food scarcity that occurred between 2007 and 2008, governments around the world are taking positive steps to ensure this event does not occur again. The incident led to increase in prices of dietary staple foods and caused frightened governments to stop food exportation, leading to widespread riots in some cases.

A NASA blog post reports that this situation led to the establishment of the Group on Earth Observation’s Global Agricultural Monitoring (GEOGLAM) which is an international group of government representatives and farming monitoring groups. They rely on Earth-imaging satellites to provide them with data which will enable them to accurately predict weather events affecting crop yields.

Rice is among the major food crop to monitor because billions of people around the world rely on it as a major staple, yet predicting its growth and yield is very difficult. The rice market is very volatile and investors, farmers, as well as consumers are at risk because a drought or flood in Southeast Asia could render about a billion people hungry.

But with the intervention of GEOGLAM, it is anticipated that this will change.

Landsat series have been in orbit since 1972 and are the most used Earth-imaging equipment for weather monitoring on Earth. In 2013 the newest Landsat 8 launched, and it maps the surface of Earth every 16 days to provide agricultural data emanating from weather and other atmospheric conditions.

This helps experts in making predictions about crop output and to detect crop stress among other agricultural issues.

Then there is the Terra and Aqua satellites used to map the Earth via its Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) instrument. These provide data every two days about crop development, plants’ responses to weather and other agricultural activities such as irrigation.

The only issue with the satellite data is that it must be accurately interpreted to give sense – which is not something everyone can do, and where Applied Geosolutions come in, with Nathan Torbick as its director.

Applied Geosolutions for the past 10 years has been working to better interpret data from Earth-imaging satellites, and this led to the Stennis Space Center to offer the company two contracts on its Small Business Innovation Research program – which facilitated the design and development of the Rice Decision Support System (RDSS).

The RDSS is a software that analyzes NASA satellites’ data with those of other organizations to better picture the influence of weather on rice fields, production, and yield modeling with a view to getting a complete picture of what’s going on on the ground, Torbick clarified.

Applied Geosolutions now favors the GEOGLAM program, and provides rice farmers and traders and investors with detailed information that helps them with key decisions about rice as a staple food.

“When we’re blind to what production will be, the market becomes speculative, and volatility prevails. This is not good for business, government, or consumers,” says Bradley Doorn, program manager for the Water Resources Applied Sciences program in NASA Headquarters’ Earth Sciences Division.

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The PanGeo Alliance, the first global alliance of Earth Observation satellite operators, recently welcomed two new members: Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary (KGS) and UrtheCast. With eight members worldwide, the Alliance now provides access to imagery and tasking opportunities from an unprecedented and growing fleet of Earth Observation sensors. The PanGeo Alliance fleet now includes 14 operational Earth Observation sensors, providing multispectral imagery in a wide range of resolutions (from 20 m to 75 cm per pixel), 4k full-color videos, and AIS data. This unique fleet assures a daily global imaging capability, with multiple revisit opportunities per day over any target.

Three months after the announcement of its sixth member, the PanGeo Alliance continues to expand adding another two new members in its federation: Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary and UrtheCast. The PanGeo Alliance is the first global alliance of Earth Observation satellite operators. With the addition of the new members the alliance counts already eight members from eight different countries: Aquila Space (US), Beijing Space Eye Innovation Technology (China), Dauria Aerospace (Russia), Deimos Imaging (Spain), Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary (Kazakhstan), Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (United Arab Emirates), ST Electronics (Singapore) and UrtheCast).

The alliance provides access to imagery and tasking opportunities from a unique and growing constellation of Earth Observation satellites, operated by its members. The constellation encompasses multispectral imagery in a range of resolutions (from 20 m to 75 cm per pixel), and a daily global imaging capability.

Every PanGeo Alliance member brings its unique capacity to the alliance, contributing to the formation of a multi-capable and diverse constellation.

The current space assets of the two new members and their future plans include:

Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary (KGS) is currently operating two Earth Observation (EO) satellites: the High Resolution (HR) KazEOSat-2 and the Very High Resolution (VHR) KazEOSat-1. In addition the company will soon launch its third EO satellite, the Medium Resolution KazSTSAT (see table below for technical details).

UrtheCast Inc. has installed two cameras on the International Space Station (ISS), which are now fully operational: the Medium Resolution Camera (MRC) Theia and the High-Resolution Camera (HRC) Iris. The UrtheCast’s vision includes a satellite Constellation scheduled for launch in 2019. The constellation will be formed by 16 satellites arranged in pairs, each with a SAR and an Optical satellite flying in formation and providing Very High Resolution (VHR) data.

All PanGeo Alliance members can provide access to the full products portfolio of the whole constellation. PanGeo multi-satellite mission planning gives customers access to imaging from all Alliance satellites as well as a connection to directly request tasked imagery from the operator. As more members are joining the alliance, the available fleet is also expanding providing customers with additional imagery resources and imaging opportunities.

PanGeo coordinates the access to member data catalogues in a seamless way, integrating data visibility and ordering from the entire Alliance archive. Customers benefit from a global network of resellers and a unified access point to new tasking and archive imagery.


Fig.1: The eight current members of the PanGeo Alliance


Fig.2: The current and future Earth Observation fleet of the PanGeo Alliance members (medium-res and high-res sensors only)


Fig.3: The current and future Earth Observation fleet of the PanGeo Alliance members (very-high-res, videos and AIS sensors only)

The Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) presented in Milan last May 2015, the Map of land consumption in Italy, produced with the help of Planetek Italia. It is the first example of reuse at national level of Copernicus core downstream services.

Soil sealing (covering the ground with an artificial, impermeable material) is one of the main causes of soil degradation in the EU. According to ISPRA research, more than 7 square metres of soil are lost in Italy every second as a result of soil sealing.

ISPRA released a tender for mapping sealed soil areas using high resolution imagery at the national level in Italy. The aim was to build on the mapping methodology which had been applied at European level in the context of the European Environment Agency (EEA)’s High Resolution Layer on sealed soil (“Imperviousness”), developed as part of the Copernicus Land Monitoring service, to produce a new map at a resolution of 5 metres. The higher resolution makes the product also suitable for applications at a local (e.g. municipal) level.

Planetek Italia’s experience in soil sealing products started in 2006 with the precursor geo-information imperviousness service within the Copernicus (then GMES) initiative of the European Commission. The first update of the imperviousness layer was done in 2009 in the frame of the geoland2 FP7 research project. Today, this service is operational, providing periodically updated maps in the frame of Copernicus Land Monitoring Service.

As a result of this activity, the company has developed a service to support the reporting on soil consumption at national and local level. The new business opportunities through national mapping initiatives.

Furthermore, Planetek is developing a procedure for the update of 5 HR layers which take advantages from the great quantity of EO data that are coming with free and open access. In particular, in order to derive a status map for the 5 HR layers, a combination of SAR and optical data is used, primarily using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data, but the methodology has been tested also using Landsat-8, RapidEye, SPOT and other data.

Links:

Contact
Planetek Italia S.r.l.
Via Massaua, 12 – 70132 Bari
Tel. +39 0809644200 Fax: +39 0809644299
email: info@planetek.it
www.planetek.it

TRE joined CLS at the end of October 2015. Altamira has been part of CLS since 2010.

CLS is a French group with over 700 people working in different offices worldwide. It provides operational services for environmental monitoring and sustainable management of marine resources and security using satellite data.

TRE and ALTAMIRA INFORMATION are leading providers of satellite-based solutions with InSAR for measuring ground motion in a variety of applications and market sectors.
Between the two companies lies a vast knowledge, which will now be exploited to the full.

“This is a very exciting time for both companies, which have a history of excellent results for clients. Our 15 years of experience as leading providers of InSAR solutions mean that together we can now offer an outstanding portfolio to our clients” explains Roberto Lorenzo, CEO of ALTAMIRA INFORMATION.

Alessandro Ferretti, CEO of TRE, adds: “The synergy between TRE, ALTAMIRA INFORMATION and CLS creates by far the largest provider of surface deformation measurements using satellite radar data. Our mastery of this technology will increase exponentially and our international team of experts will work jointly to develop even more sophisticated and powerful algorithms opening new applications“.

Together, TRE and ALTAMIRA INFORMATION form the largest InSAR group worldwide, counting on 80 people with a diverse range of technical and scientific backgrounds, including geologists, geophysicists, environmental engineers and radar specialists.

TRE and ALTAMIRA have offices in Milan, Barcelona, Toulouse and Vancouver.

TRE
Headquarters
Ripa di Porta Ticinese, 79
20143 Milan, Italy
sales@treuropa.com
www.treuropa.com
Altamira Information
Headquarters
C/ Corsega, 381-387
E-08037 Barcelona, Spain
info@altamira-information.com
www.altamira-information.com

When global food prices spiked dramatically in late 2007 and into 2008, the costs of many basic dietary staples doubled or even tripled around the world, sparking protests and riots. Panicked governments stopped exporting food, aggravating the crisis.

Almost as troubling: the crisis had taken the world by surprise. To keep it from happening again, international leaders created an agricultural monitoring group, bringing together representatives from governments and aid groups. The initiative, dubbed the Group on Earth Observation’s Global Agricultural Monitoring (GEOGLAM), looked in large part to data from Earth-imaging satellites, hoping to use it to make better predictions about weather and future crops.

One of the key crops to monitor was rice. It is a major food staple for billions of people around the world, including in some of the world’s poorest regions. But it is one of the most complicated crops to make predictions about, and it has no sizeable futures market, largely because traders are missing the kind of information GEOGLAM was founded to provide.

As a result, the market for rice is incredibly volatile, putting investors, producers and, ultimately, consumers at risk. A flood or drought in Southeast Asia can mean hundreds of thousands of people worldwide will starve. The GEOGLAM initiative set about to change that.

Among the satellites most popularly used for Earth-imaging data are the Landsat series, in orbit since 1972. The latest, Landsat 8, launched in 2013 and covers Earth’s surface every 16 days, capturing images in a variety of ways, including two thermal infrared bandwidths. The thermal information is especially important for detecting crop stress and supporting crop predictions, as it reveals moisture and temperature on the land surface, in plants and in the lower atmosphere.

The Terra and Aqua satellites also provide important images of Earth using the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) instrument. They map Earth every day or two in 36 visible and infrared bandwidths. The frequency of those images helps monitor changes in crop stages, plants’ responses to weather and farm activities such as irrigation or tillage.

Making predictions based on raw satellite data, however, is no simple task. “You have to be an expert to transform that data into useful information,” says Nathan Torbick.

That’s where Torbick’s company, Applied Geosolutions, came in. The company, where Torbick is a director, has for a decade been researching applications for Earth-imaging satellite data. With the help of two Small Business Innovation Research contracts from Stennis Space Center, they designed a web-based program, called the Rice Decision Support System (RDSS). The software combines data from NASA satellites and others, incorporating measures of rice fields, yield modeling and weather forecasts “to give you a complete picture of what’s going on on the ground,” says Torbick.

Using that data, it then generates information in real time about rice coverage, growth stages, deviations from normal, and expected yield around the globe.

Abroad, the system is focused on pilot sites in Java, Indonesia, and Vietnam, where the data gathered is used primarily for supporting food-security programs and commodity markets.

In the United States, parts of the country’s two biggest rice-producing regions Eastern Arkansas and the Sacramento Valley are running out of water. There, Applied GeoSolutions has paid partnerships with farmers and agencies to help them plan their growing season and manage resources, especially irrigation. The imagery also proves which farms should receive incentives for using alternative irrigation methods, a function RDSS also performs at a pilot site in Brazil.

Applied GeoSolutions now supports the GEOGLAM initiative, helping to supply producers, buyers and investors worldwide with more detailed, comprehensive information and projections about rice production. “When we’re blind to what production will be, the market becomes speculative, and volatility prevails. This is not good for business, government, or consumers,” says Bradley Doorn, program manager for the Water Resources Applied Sciences program in NASA Headquarters’ Earth Sciences Division.

To learn more about this NASA spinoff, read the original article from Spinoff 2016.

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satellite images depict the An Giang Province in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, a major rice-producing region, at different times of year. Dark blue and black areas are inundated and have low biomass, while white and gray areas are other crops like row crops and trees. The differences in color indicate a change in the ratio between soil moisture and biomass. Credits: NASA

Friday 11 December 2015 at 19:29, the SPOT 5 satellite sent back its last packet of telemetry.

After acquiring millions of pictures of Earth, the SPOT 5 satellite was retired from service between 1 and 11 December. Following a series of 6 orbital manoeuvres to lower its perigee (the point on its orbit closest to Earth), the satellite’s fuel tanks were emptied and its batteries disconnected by CNES teams in Toulouse. It is now stationed safely in an elliptical orbit at an altitude between 625 and 809.

SPOT 5 completed some 70,000 revolutions of the planet, made 25,000 telemetry/telecommand passes and collected nearly 8.2 million 60-km-by-60-km images of Earth’s surface over its operational lifetime.

Normal 0 21 false false false FR X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions / table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:“Tableau Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:”“; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:“Arial”,“sans-serif”; mso-bidi-font-family:“Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} «With its 2.5-metre resolution and superior imaging capacity, SPOT 5 has been an incontestable commercial success across the globe during its 13 years in orbit Normal 0 21 false false false FR X-NONE X-NONE / Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:“Tableau Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:”“; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:“Arial”,“sans-serif”; mso-bidi-font-family:“Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} » said Bernard Cabrières, Deputy Director of Operations at CNES.

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[Via Satellite 01-11-2016] IHS and Airbus Defence and Space have announced a three-year partnership agreement.

Under the agreement, Airbus Defence and Space will provide newly acquired imagery from its Pleiades, Spot and TerraSAR X satellites, for use as primary sources and fusion with open source information for actionable intelligence. It will also provide access to the GO Monitor service, which delivers reliable surveillance and change information anywhere on Earth. The Airbus and IHS Aerospace, Defence & Security partnership brings together world leaders in insight and imagery to deliver a detailed picture of dynamic events in volatile regions worldwide.

IHS Aerospace, Defence & Security has been using imagery from Airbus Defence and Space for more than two years, breaking significant news stories on a second Russian base in Syria, new developments in North Korea’s nuclear program as well as island building in the South China Sea.

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GISAT leads an international project aiming at implementation of operational information services supporting urban vacant land recycling within the sustainable business model.

In recent decades, urban sprawl became a serious European-wide problem, not only due to total land taken, but also due to its spatial distribution patterns and quality of the land consumed. Land use efficiency is becoming a prime political objective at both European and city level, and the EU Land Communication aims to establish “zero net land take” across the EU by 2050. Land is a finite resource and therefore the sprawl has to be regulated. This can be realized through careful management of urban land, applying the concept of land recycling. Only such an approach can assure sustainable development of European landscape in the long term perspective.

The EU funded URBIS (Urban Land Recycling Information Services for Sustainable Cities) project targets these issues and focuses on investigation of vacant land potential in urban areas, and the opportunities for previously developed land or brownfield to support urban regeneration safeguarding greenfield sites, as well as on investigation of urban green systems. URBIS delivers methodologies and tools to provide accurate up-to-date intelligence that is comparable across European cities to support the definition and implementation of sustainable planning and governance strategies in cities and city-regions throughout Europe.

URBIS services are built on data acquired in frame of the Copernicus programme. This generates large number of standard open-data, Earth Observation datasets as well as standard services (Urban Atlas, High Resolution Layers (HRLs)), which can be utilized for urban land recycling policy support. First, analysis based directly on Urban Atlas thematic layer are implemented, to obtain the overview about the amount and distribution of potential development sites. Second, advanced image analysis methods are employed, to gather additional information, which is not available in Urban Atlas thematic layer, in particular about internal structure of the sites. These techniques, utilizing both pixel and object based image analysis (OBIA) approaches, are dealing with multiple spatial, spectral and textural image characteristics. They are applied preferably on SPOT5 imagery, acquired for European Urban Atlas mapping. As a result, the inventory of potential development and green sites in urban areas, including their characteristics detectable from EO data, like level of sealing, amount and type of vegetation cover etc., has been obtained. Preparing detailed methodology, the robustness is an important factor, to assure the applicability of workflow for potential European-wide analysis in the future.

The implementation is demonstrated on three pilot sites – Greater Amiens (FR), Osnabrueck (DE) and the Moravian-Silesian Region (CZ). Baseline services for the year 2012 and backdating towards 2006 and cca 1996 will be implemented. Then, thematic services will be prepared, exploiting results of baseline and update services, to provide information about the urban re-development potential directly to the users. Character of URBIS services has been tailored to meet requirements of end-users, which were set in close cooperation with pilots and with an external Stakeholder Board. Both strategic users at different levels (local and regional authorities, European and national agencies in charge of urban planning) and operational users (such as industrial estates operators or private land developers which can be interested in information on suitable vacant sites) are targeted.

URBIS project (http://www.ict-urbis.eu) has received funding from the EU FP7 ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (Grant Agreement No. 621125). The URBIS project consortium is lead by GISAT (Czechia) and consists of six additional partners: SIRS (France), Universitaet Osnabrueck (Germany), UNIGE (Universita Degli Studi Di Genova, Italy), STADT+ (Germany) and ADUGA (Agence De Developpement Et D’urbanisme Du Grand Amienois Association, France).

Gisat provides wide range of geoinformation services based on Earth Observation technology. It focuses on operational application of satellite mapping to monitor various aspects of our environment and development of dedicated web based platforms for geoinformation analysis and assessment
Web // E-mail // Tel:+420 271741935 // Fax: +420 271741936

EARSC organized with EEA an Information session on the upcoming calls for tender for Copernicus full operation, land service, pan-European and local components.

Information session on upcoming calls for tender for Copernicus full operation, land service, pan-European and local components.

  • Pan-European component: production of High Resolution Layers (HRL’s) for the 2015 reference year, including re-analysis of time series for the HRL imperviousness.
  • Llocal component with the production of Riparian Zones (extension of existing products) and a second series of Natura2000 sites mapping.

EEA provided information on the upcoming CfT with some additional opportunity for service industry feedback.

Presentations
common_framework_for_earth_observation_data_draft_120215.pdf

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