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Geospatial Insight and Deimos Space UK have been granted funding from the European Space Agency (ESA Business Applications) to further develop RetailWatch, with an initial focus on the European market. The project is part of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) business applications programme, which is dedicated to the development of applications and services using different space assets, including satellite imagery.

RetailWatch will monitor the number of cars in the car parks of selected retail outlets to estimate footfall, in an effort to predict the financial performance of retailers. The RetailWatch project uses high resolution satellite imagery and artificial intelligence techniques to provide an additional service to retail companies in a competitive market. RetailWatch will provide investors in retail stocks with an early indicator of equity performance before the publication of retailer’s quarterly reports.

The project will draw upon Geospatial Insight’s vast knowledge of satellite imagery, innovative machine-learning capabilities and experience within the financial markets. Couple this with Deimos Space UK’s new machine-learning approaches to feature classification of high resolution satellite imagery, and a formidable partnership is formed.

Dave Fox, CEO of Geospatial Insight comments:
“We’re looking forward to strengthening our relationship with the Deimos Space UK team by collaborating on RetailWatch. The awarding of funding by the ESA for this project demonstrates their commitment to investing in satellite technology and machine-learning both in Europe and globally.”

Michael Lawrence, Business Development Director of Deimos Space UK added:
“We’re excited to be working alongside the Geospatial Insight team in developing RetailWatch. This represents a fantastic opportunity to use our machine learning capability to provide an extra analytical dimension to the world of retail.”

Since 2007, UK space companies have grown at an average rate of 10% a year, with employment also growing 15% year on year (1). The launch of RetailWatch opens up another avenue of commercial opportunity within this industry and represents an opportunity for various stakeholders (such as hedge fund managers, commodity traders and retailers) to gain a detailed insight into retail performance.

Key to the RetailWatch project is the use of machine-learning algorithms developed by both Deimos Space UK and Geospatial Insight to automate the car counting process. As a service global machine learning had an estimated worth of US$1.07 billion in 2016, rising to US$19.86 billion by the end of 2025 (2). RetailWatch seeks to marry together two flourishing sectors; space and machine learning, to provide a unique insight into the retail sector.
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Deimos Imaging and UrtheCast have been awarded a GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) 070 contract by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), the procurement arm of the federal government.

This is the first time that a European company in Earth observation services has been awarded such a contract in the U.S., making Deimos Imaging’s full portfolio of products and services available to all U.S. government agencies.

In order to be awarded the GSA Schedule contract, Deimos Imaging and UrtheCast had to undergo an extensive and rigorous approval process and ensure its services are in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.

What is the GSA?
The GSA is an independent agency of the U.S. government established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies.

The GSA provides millions of commercial products and services to government agencies that benefit from “most-favored customer” pricing with pre-approved vendors. This is designed to help U.S. agencies to source products and services and comply with rules and regulations for buying.

The five-year GSA program establishes long-term government-wide contracts and allows federal customers to efficiently purchase Earth Observation products and services from Deimos Imaging under GSA IT Schedule 70, Special Item Number 132-41.

What does Deimos Imaging offer?
As a recipient of the contract, Deimos Imaging can provide federal, state, local, tribal, and regional government agencies with customized and ready-to-use satellite imagery products and services, that are expected to contribute to decision making in a wide range of sectors, such as agriculture, oil and gas, maritime surveillance and defense and security.

“We are very pleased to have received a GSA contract because it empowers our data strategy to unlock Earth Observation’s full potential,” said Jamie Ritchie, Chief Commercial Officer at Deimos Imaging. “Deimos Imaging has enjoyed a long, successful history of providing satellite products and services to public and private entities. Being part of the GSA schedule program allows our portfolio to be accessible to agencies across the U.S. and leverages our position to accelerate decision making in a wide variety of fields and to meet the needs of our customers there.”

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gis and geography are becoming increasingly important not only in the geosector or in clearly geo-related business, but also in a variety of different fields. more and more companies in the maritime, logistics, insurance, risk management or agricultural sector are recognizing the potential of geodata and the insights derived from it.

The preponderance of emerging insights, increasingly advanced electro-optical sensors and development of highly sophisticated geospatial solutions have instilled an increasingly ubiquitous demand for accessible geospatial intelligence (geoint) technologies heretofore the purview of highly specialized geographic information systems and remotely sensed imagery professionals alone. consequently, this ever-increasing demand for big geo data and its analytics requires a more widespread comprehension of formerly esoteric geospatial concepts and the adoption of at least some technical knowledge in geospatial software and the interpretation of insights derived from it. however, compared to other specialist areas, there has been a widening gap in knowledge and corresponding training courses available in the fields of gis, rsi, and earth observation in general. that is, until now.

As your trusted geo-services guide, cloudeo is teaming up with our partners at geo university to provide a seamless online training platform offering high quality online courses taught by formally educated and highly experienced geo-professional experts, with access to an ever-expanding catalogue of geoint data, software, and solutions available on the cloudeo geomarketplace.
Courses vary from simple note collections and books for people with constrained schedules wishing to study at their own pace, to comprehensive lectures complete with structured exercises, quizzes and more.

furthermore, courses are tailored for students, scientists, or decision makers alike seeking either an introduction to geoint and the latest earth observation technologies or to further enhance their existing knowledge in the following topics:
• geographical information system (gis)
• webgis
• remote sensing/earth observation
• photogrammetry

cloudeo’s mission has always been to empower our customers and help navigate a path of least resistance in leveraging the latest advancements in spatiotemporally enabled geospatial data, software, and insights with customizable and flexible solutions to match their needs. the cloudeo workbench gives you pay-per-use access to a powerful virtual desktop pre-configured for geoprocessing. this enables our users to focus on what is most important to them: their geoprocessing. costly scaling of complex geoprocessing tasks is ameliorated by eliminating the need for customers to invest in new or complicated it infrastructure and permanent software licenses. this makes working with envi, snap, python, etc., extremely convenient. cloudeo‘s readily available workbench environments come pre-installed with the latest software; automatically updated whenever there is a new version available, with regular backups of the workbench being performed for maximum security and availability.

we offer the workbench on a monthly subscription basis, which makes it the perfect complement to the geo university courses; granting instant access to a fully featured geospatial software solutions environment ideal for hands-on training, labs, practice exercises, and ad-hoc analytics experimentation. users can immediately put what they have learned into practice without the need to contend with the time-consuming minutia and expense of hardware, software, and long-term license subscription management.

sign up for your first course today and get the cloudeo workbench!

Already this year, we have signed two international agreements – with AGI in India and CRCSI in Australia. I reported on the first in my last editorial in January. The second was concluded during a trade mission to Australia we organised with CRCSI at the beginning of March. The mission was timed to coincide with the visit of Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska who is responsible for DG GROW and the Copernicus programme. The mission involved 7 European companies, and over 60 Australian companies attended the three workshops in Brisbane, Canberra and Sydney. In Canberra, I joined a panel discussion held in the presence of Commissioner Bienkowska regarding co-operation between Europe and Australia in the field of EO services including Copernicus. More information on the mission can be found here

These two agreements are both evidence of our determination to develop international links and to provide support to member companies looking to develop international business. As part of an EASME project called IDEEO, we are currently working with 2 cluster partners, Pole Mer Bretagne in France and Cluster Lucano di Bioeconomia in Italy to define a strategy which combines EO services with other sectors ie agriculture and off-shore energy. As well as the fact finding visit to Australia, we have also just visited Chile (for a second time) and other visits are planned including to Egypt later this year to join the bi-annual AARSE conference. More information on IDEEO can be found here.

In this time, we have also found 3 new colleagues! Marion Bouvet has replaced Ariane Dubost who after having her baby last year has decided to relocate back to France. I really do wish her all the best and thank her for her excellent work whilst with EARSC. Then Chris Oligschlager has joined us in a role as junior analyst. Our analytical work is increasing associated with various projects and this will be an important role and activity for us in the future. Finally, we have found a new senior project manager who will be joining us in June.

All this means that, whilst one year ago we were just 3 people working out of my dining room, EARSC will shortly be 7 people working out of an office. Some transition for a small trade association!

But it does mean that we can do more for the industry and our members? The industry is going through a significant change to the environment in which companies are operating and we are constantly monitoring to determine what we can do to help to adapt. We move forward with eoMALL which will become live in June as well as developing the international aspects of our work.

We have also just published our latest report into the benefits generated through the use of Copernicus Sentinel data. The focus is on agriculture in Denmark and it is fascinating to see how rapidly this part of the sector is growing. We selected a single product, Fieldsense, in Denmark but there are many others which we could have chosen for the study. Nevertheless, it shows the enormous potential for savings in the agriculture sector through the use of EO data and the variety of companies entering the business and their different business models will also be the subject of future studies which we hope to do. You can find the case report here.

Our next event is in Sofia on 17th April along with a workshop organised under the Bulgarian presidency of the EU on 18th and 19th. If you are there, be sure to look us up!

by Geoff Sawyer

DigitalGlobe has formed a partnership with Ecopia Tech to use proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and cloud computing to create building footprints. By using Ecopia’s U.S. Building Footprints powered by DigitalGlobe, customers will have current information on structures in their areas of interest.

Ecopia, a developer in DigitalGlobe’s Geospatial Big Data platform (GBDX) ecosystem, established a process to create building footprints quickly and at scale by leveraging machine learning in combination with DigitalGlobe’s cloud-based 100 petabyte imagery library. According to Ecopia, the service provides actionable insights for observing, analyzing, and monitoring business processes such as supply chain management, urban planning, and asset monitoring for industries that include energy, insurance, real estate, telecom, and location-based services. Starting with the United States, the two companies will extract 2D building footprints across the Earth, then refresh the datasets to find and track change over time.

DigitalGlobe and Ecopia intend to extract every building footprint in the United States by mid-year 2018, and many major international locations by the beginning of 2019. The service will be available off the shelf or on-demand, with or without the source high-resolution imagery, and will include the option to subscribe to regular updates.

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The BigDataCube project is developing flexible and scalable services for massive spatio-temporal Earth Observation (EO) data, offered as datacubes. This paradigm replaces the millions of EO files by a few massive multi-dimensional space/time objects, such as 3D image timeseries and 4D weather forecast cubes. This way, raster data get ready for spatio-temporal analysis in the large.

Concretely, the project deploys the European Datacube, rasdaman, in two infrastructures:
The commercial hosted processing environment of cloudeo. Novel datacube access control and quota will safely handle both free and proprietary data provided by Intermap and PlanetObserver.
The public service of CODE-DE, the German Copernicus hub, thereby complementing the batch-oriented Hadoop service with interactive extraction and processing along the paradigm of “any query, any time, on any size”. DLR will exemplarily establish a weather and ocean analytics tool based on rasdaman.

Further, CODE-DE and cloudeo services will be federated, allowing users to combine datacubes from both services without the need for downloading them first.

Goal of BigDataCube is to enhance access to value-adding services supporting collaboration across disciplinary and geographical boundaries for industry and research. The massively simplified Big Data handling benefits users of existing services as well as new businesses, e.g., in agro-informatics: they don’t need to develop or deploy complex technology and manage all data, but can use data readily, thereby freeing resources for their core business. Hence, on the BigDataCube platform novel, specialized services can be established by third parties in a fast, flexible, and scalable manner.
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China has launched its 10th space mission of the year, deploying three civilian-operated Earth observation satellites with cameras to help monitor natural disasters, survey natural resources and assist in infrastructure planning.

The Earth-imaging satellites lifted off on top of a Long March 4C rocket at 0322 GMT on 31 March (11:22 p.m. EDT on 30 March) from the Taiyuan space center in northern China’s Shanxi province, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

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Agronow is spearheading a new revolution it calls Agriculture 5.0, through which it aims to monitor crops by using Artificial Intelligence (AI), making it possible for all sectors involved in agribusiness — banks, tradings, lenders and insurers — to receive alerts, information, analyses and projections that are fundamental for remotely strategic decision making.

Using satellite imagery to monitor rural properties around the world, Agronow places all of the information on a farm’s productivity onto a unique platform, with climate and marketing information, harvest alerts, drops in production, product quality and other variables of interest, and it also projects future harvests with a high degree of certainty.

“Agronow is developing a technology that uses neural networks to determine what a crop is without having a manual input. This will allow the company to make correct estimates not only about yields, but also about the total agricultural production of a region or country. So, we will be able to deliver completely new market intelligence with a detailed vision of how to expand the agricultural frontier and of changes in weekly production,” said Agronow CEO Rafael Coelho

Coelho explained that Agronow’s analysis allow the most productive areas with the greatest business potential to be identified. “Companies will be able to decrease risks and to have more knowledge about areas that are unknown or that do not have good information. Not having reliable information causes them to adjust prices in order to mitigate their product risk. With the use of our platform, over the long term it is expected that there will be a reduction in the products and services prices — such as lending and insurance — allowing a better cost structure for rural producers and, consequently, improved food production.”

The tool has its own algorithm, with radiometric and thermodynamic parameters to determine a crop’s yield potential. Headquartered in Brazil, Agronow has already processed more than two billion acres.

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Airborne Technologies is proud to have obtained FIKI certification from EASA for the Vulcanair P68R.The aircraft type is thus approved for “Flights Into Known Icing” conditions.

The complex modification of the basic aircraft with all redundant systems included a test flight programme with dry ice shapes, as well as natural ice flights in northern Scotland, to prove the de-ice capacity under most adverse conditions. All modifications for the special mission equipment such as EO/IR gimbal and the whole array of antennas for tactical radio and down/up-link, are covered by this STC as well. With this FIKI capability for a 2t-class aircraft, Airborne Technologies sets new standards with regard to dispatch reliability and safety of the customers.

Wolfgang Grumeth, CEO of Airborne Technologies, says: “The integration of special equipment into the different platforms goes meanwhile far beyond the simple installation of sensors. The complexity of systems and customer requirements makes it increasingly necessary to intervene in all areas. We are taking over more and more modifications previously assigned to OEMs. Besides FIKI we have recently certified TCAS II and P-RNAV/SBAS.

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2018 is the European Year of Cultural Heritage. Throughout the year, tangible and intangible, as well as natural and digital cultural heritage of Europe is celebrated. The free and open data and information delivered by the Copernicus programme represents a valuable resource for Cultural Heritage monitoring and preservation at European and global level.

Deformation phenomena affecting Rome’s historical city centre (Source: IREA-CNR, Italy)

Cultural heritage, a shared source of remembrance, understanding, identity, dialogue, and creativity, represents an irreplaceable source of life and inspiration while contributing to social cohesion and economic growth.

The importance of cultural heritage preservation is globally recognised. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has a World Heritage mission aimed at management and preservation of cultural heritage sites – to date, 1,073 sites are registered and monitored by UNESCO.

The November 2014 European Council conclusions on participatory governance of cultural heritage called on the European Commission to declare 2018 the European Year of Cultural Heritage (EYCH), and we are finally here. This milestone represents a fundamental recognition of how European heritage shaped European society as we know it today.

Nowadays, tangible and natural cultural heritage is in danger, because of natural hazards and Climate Change, as well as man-made threats and criminal activities. It is our collective responsibility to act.

The data and information offered by the Copernicus programme can contribute to tangible and natural cultural heritage preservation and management. Earth Observation (EO) data is becoming increasingly instrumental, with numerous projects and applications aimed at providing products tailored to the needs of cultural heritage.

Examples of useful EO-based products include:
- Land-use change maps
- Natural subsidence, ground motion detection
- Risk assessment maps
- Archaeological sites monitoring and identification (e.g. buried sites)
- Monitoring of the destruction or looting of sites
- Urban sprawl monitoring
- Climate Change indicators
- Air pollution monitoring
- Coastline monitoring (erosion)
- Bathymetry

Tools integrating EO data into daily cultural heritage-related activities are already in place – a good example of them is the online training environment “SpaceToPlace – EO to Empower UNESCO Site Managers” from Heidelberg University, winner of the 2016 Copernicus Masters University Challenge. Its objective is to provide UNESCO site managers and planning authorities with the right tools and expertise to incorporate Copernicus Sentinel data into their daily work processes and operational routines. The online training environment features easy-to-use, web-based, remote-sensing software alongside dedicated learning modules. Practical hands-on exercises develop the necessary knowledge and skills while also showcasing sample workflows for monitoring ongoing environmental, economic and social processes.
“ Information from the Copernicus Programme, especially Sentinel data, is a core component of our newly available Space2Place e-learning module. It is the first English module within our e-learning platform geospektiv and is linked to our free online remote sensing application BLIF. As UNESCO Chair on World Heritage and Biosphere Reserve Observation and Education, it is one of our main objectives to communicate the opportunities and benefits of Earth Observation to specific stakeholders and to the civil society in general. Space2Place make it is possible to assess land cover changes, to evaluate the impact of Climate Change and to improve spatial planning. All in all, Copernicus data and information represent a fundamental cornerstone to safeguard our global cultural and natural heritage. ”
Prof. Alexander Siegmund and Prof. Tobias Matusch, Heidelberg University

While Space2Place targets UNESCO users, other initiatives are focusing on EU national and regional stakeholders. The NEREUS Earth Observation Working Group brings a regional perspective on EO imagery and geo-information data for cultural heritage and landscapes. In the year 2000, the European Landscape Convention (Florence Convention) underlined the necessity “to integrate landscape into its regional and town planning policies and in its cultural, environmental, agricultural, social and economic policies”. Regions need to ensure compliance and implementation of numerous EU-directives and legislations regarding natural and built environments, and they are usually also the responsible authorities for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Services/Operation of Environmental Agencies. At the regional level the contribution of EO services and products such as those from Copernicus could be useful for:
- Management of cultural heritage during emergencies, particularly in the case of geo-hazards
- Mapping, monitoring and management of cultural heritage as a daily routine.

NEREUS’ concrete actions include a position paper (currently in preparation) on Space for Cultural Heritage and related use cases from EU Regions.

“ The use of EO applications in the domain of cultural heritage has increased over the last few decades and recent studies have demonstrated the usefulness of both passive or active sensors. These data can be used for various purposes such as the detection of crop and soil marks used as a proxy for the identification of architectural buried remains, studying and mapping land use changes in cultural and archaeological landscapes, monitoring of natural and anthropogenic hazards that might threaten archaeological sites and monuments and so forth. ”
Prof. Branka Cuca, Co-chair of the NEREUS Earth Observation Working Group.

The key challenge of the use of EO data for cultural heritage monitoring is the development of tailored products, more than the necessity of new types of space-based observations, therefore research is necessary in this case. As of today, several H2020 projects are looking in this direction.

The HERACLES (HEritage Resilience Against CLimate Events on-Site) project aims at designing, validating and promoting responsive systems/solutions for the effective resilience of cultural heritage sites against the effects of Climate Change. This will be operationally pursued with the development of a system exploiting an ICT platform able to collect and integrate multisource information. Within this framework, Copernicus could enable continuous monitoring of high-risk cultural heritage sites. Specific products such as change detection analysis (optical imagery) or deformation analysis (SAR imagery) have proven to be extremely beneficial for preventive action in these sites.

The PROTection of European Cultural HEritage from GeO-hazards (PROTHEGO) project aims to make an innovative contribution towards the analysis of geo-hazards across European cultural heritage areas. Cultural heritage sites are impacted and threatened by several internal and external factors, with both rapid and slow onset, including natural hazards, such as landslides, sinkholes, settlement, subsidence, earthquakes or extreme meteorological events. PROTHEGO applies novel space technology based on radar interferometry (InSAR) to monitor monuments and sites in Europe which are potentially at-risk due to geo-hazards. Remotely sensed information on ground stability and motion are combined with geo-hazard datasets available to identify the most endangered sites across Europe.

“ Space-based measurement techniques applied to cultural heritage conservation and mitigation policies are the most advanced, sustainable, low impact techniques for environmental risk reduction for cultural heritage sites. In any case, there is a strong need for dedicated and simple tools for downstream service providers and end-users. ”
Dr Daniele Spizzichino, Institute for Environmental Research and Protection (ISPRA), Italy

Lastly, the HERCULES (Sustainable Futures for Europe’s Heritage in Cultural Landscapes) project focuses on the use of Copernicus data to support sustainable and cost-effective landscape monitoring. The objective is to empower public and private actors to protect and sustainably manage cultural landscapes at a local, national and pan-European level. Copernicus is particularly useful thanks to its high-resolution (Sentinel-2) and Medium-Resolution (Sentinel-3) multi-spectral optical imagery.

Last year. the European Commission’s DG GROW organised the “Copernicus for Cultural Heritage” workshop in Brussels. The objective of the workshop was to gather Intermediate and end users’ needs in the cultural heritage domain, while providing an overview of the current Copernicus offer. The key points discussed at the event can be summarised as follows:

- Going from response to prevention is key: preventive actions should be privileged with respect to reactive ones, e.g.: high frequency of observations (constant monitoring) and high and very-high resolution imagery;

- There is a need for user-ready products (intermediate actors between the data providers and the end-users, e.g. site managers);

- Awareness raising activities must be developed with respect to Copernicus products already available. The cultural heritage community needs to gain knowledge about the Copernicus offering;

- Cultural heritage is an integral part of sustainable development (e.g. urban planning) –interdisciplinary approaches should be developed;

- Multi-source data integration is essential to produce value-adding products. There should be a stronger integration between space-based and in situ observations.

Copernicus was not designed to specifically serve the cultural heritage community, nevertheless Copernicus data can support cultural heritage monitoring, preservation, and management. Efforts should be directed towards maximising the benefits that Copernicus can bring to cultural heritage, and to society and to the wider EU economy.
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