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In order to meet internal needs, and after a long period of R&D, Geo4i is pleased to announce the implementation of an image processing tool, into its geospatial platform, in order to produce automatically radar coherence maps.

Now, it is possible, in few clicks, to request the generation of coherence maps at a given time or periodically.

The tool, integrated into the platform, allows you to enter your area of interest, to check the availability of SAR imagery, to select images of interests over a given period of time, to download them and then to launch process. Of course, it is also possible to plan the process on a future period: the system will then generate products when images will be available.

Currently fully operational with Sentinel 1 data from the Copernicus constellation, the processing chain is adaptable, on request, to the Cosmo-SkyMed and TerraSar X constellations.

Applications are many: refugees monitoring, border monitoring, troop movements, detection / evolution of anthropic structures, damage assessment…

Geo4i continues its innovative activities with the implementation of new processing chains to better meet its customers’ needs.

(By Kendall Russell | March 3, 2017) Robbie Schingler is the co-founder and chief strategy officer at Planet, where he heads the company’s efforts to usher in the next era of Earth Observation (EO) capabilities. Ahead of his opening keynote “A Global Sensing Revolution” at the SATELLITE 2017 Conference & Exhibition in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, March 9, Schingler took a moment to talk with Via Satellite about the company’s long term goals and his hopes for the EO industry.

VIA SATELLITE: The big elephant in the room is the Terra Bella acquisition. What are you most excited about as far as what this unlocks for Planet?

Schingler: About a month ago we did announce that Planet entered a definitive agreement to purchase Terra Bella out of Google. The deal is not finalized — we are going through a number of regulatory approvals, and everything is going well. We expect that it will happen over the coming weeks to couple of months, so we really do look forward to this coming true.

From a personal standpoint both Will [Marshall], the co-founder of Planet, and I have known the team from the very beginning, as we both were startups at the beginning of the decade. While we take a similar approach to technology development, Planet chose to go much smaller in satellite size and mass to allow for us to launch more spacecraft and come up with a monitoring mission to image the whole world every day. I think what Terra Bella chose to focus on was innovating on the cost side of things. So all along we’ve been fairly complementary in what our product offerings and aspirations are.

VIA SATELLITE: Could you lay out your game plan for 2017? Are there any projects you’re particularly interested in pursuing this year?

Schingler: Well, we’ve already had a very busy 2017. Let me give you a couple of highlights. One, of course, is the Terra Bella announcement. Additionally though, we launched a world record of 88 satellites on an Indian PSLV. We have contacted all of the spacecraft, we’re undergoing commissioning at the moment and our team has been quite focused on catching all of that data and getting it whitelisted. That will be the case for the next quarter or so. But what’s super important is this has actually been the mission we’ve been on since we started six years ago, and that is to image the whole world every day. These satellites do that. We’ve had a number of really compelling user applications that have been developed on top of this monitoring data and I think it’s just scratching the surface.

VIA SATELLITE: Could you describe your Earth Observation (EO) capabilities in further detail?

Schingler: We have so many satellites in space that we effectively created a line scanner for the planet at 9:30 a.m. This is in polar orbit, in a sun synchronous orbit, and as the Earth rotates underneath it we scan the planet. We image everywhere every day. When you stack all that data and put some analytics against it, you can extract extremely meaningful things about what’s happening. That’s useful for just about any sector you can think about, from the federal community to the agriculture and forestry sectors to the commodities and insurance markets.

This is a new step, to be able to image the whole world every day and then activate that data to IT infrastructure that allows for you and I to actually get access to it. People who aren’t experts in remote sensing can get access to this data and these information feeds to search, discover, annotate, and share stories around the changing planet. I think that’s the major theme of this year for us at Planet: we’re building the infrastructure to make this possible.

VIA SATELLITE: Are there any other companies operating on a similar scale as far as earth observation?

Schingler: You have government programs like the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sentinel primarily used by the science community. They’re fairly coarse, from 10 meters to 30 meters in spatial resolution, so that means a football field is only 3 pixels in length and only 1 pixel wide. Something that coarse is really good for scientific understanding, but as you get down to 3 meters per pixel — which is what we do — then increase the temporal resolution by updating that every day, you can really see dynamic change. And there is no one capable, government, commercial or otherwise, that can image the whole world every day at this high resolution.

VIA SATELLITE: What challenges do you foresee this year and beyond?

Schingler: I’m a space guy. I kind of grew up at NASA through my twenties … so I very much enjoy coming up with new missions and developing new technology. We have to make sure we anchor in progress and really become focused on our users and our customers. So for me one of the challenges is to become very maniacally user-driven. I think it’s incumbent on us and our team of 400 to build a long-term sustainable enterprise that brings about this new information feed for the planet.

On the space side of things … the largest challenge that we face is launch, getting frequent, reliable, low cost access to space where you want to go and when you want to go. That has been and continues to remain the largest barrier of innovation in the aerospace community. I’m a strong advocate and would be one of the first paying customers for the emergence of small, nano launch capabilities to allow for us to change the mental model of what we do in space.

VIA SATELLITE: What does the next step for EO look like? Are there any big technological shifts lurking around the corner?

Schingler: The major shift that I see in EO is all on the downstream side of things. I think the real fundamental shift is [EO] actually becoming a new utility that is used in our day-to-day lives, either in the workplace or in your personal life. We can move EO, which currently primarily has an end user that is a government customer, to operate so fast and efficiently that we can grow the number of users by orders of magnitude. When that happens there will be a tremendous amount of market growth and commercial growth, and commercial feedback as far as what people care about in their applications, in other data sets, etc.

There’s a lot of data and what’s been missing with making it available to the masses is the analytics on top of it.

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(February 2017) Planet successfully launched 88 Dove satellites to orbit, the largest satellite constellation ever to reach orbit. This is not just a launch (or a world record, for that matter!); for our team this is a major milestone

It is the culmination of a huge effort over the past 5 years. In 2011 we set ourselves the audacious mission of imaging the entire Earth land area every day. We were convinced that armed with such data, humanity would be able to have a significant positive impact on many of the world’s greatest challenges. We calculated that it would take between 100-150 satellites to achieve this, and we started building them. After today’s launch, Planet operates 149 satellites in orbit. We have reached our milestone.

It’s taken a minor Apollo project to get here! Behind the scenes we’ve miniaturized satellites; learned how to manufacture them at scale; constructed the world’s second largest private network of ground stations; custom built an automated mission control system; created a massive data pipeline able to process the vast amount of imagery we collect; and developed a software platform that lets customers, researchers, governments and NGOs access imagery quickly. Each of these has been a significant undertaking in and of itself—and together it represents a major systems engineering project. This is not to mention the non-engineering efforts from raising capital, receiving regulatory licenses, booking launches, and building a base of hundreds of partners that use the data to solve their needs.

Without a doubt, the single largest driver behind this record-breaking success is the unrelenting dedication of the Planet team. We’ve been humbled by them for the last five years and we thank them today.

Next up: getting this data to our customers and to those who need it the most! But for now Planet is having a great start to the year worthy of a little celebration.

Here are some additional facts and figures regarding this launch:

  • The 88 Dove satellites (collectively known as “Flock 3p”) rode aboard a PSLV rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India
  • This leads to two world records: a record for the most satellites ever launched on a single rocket; and a record for the largest private satellite constellation in history, totaling 149 satellites in all
  • This is our 15th launch of Dove satellites and second aboard India’s PSLV. The launch of Flock 3p comes off the successful launch of Flock 2p on the PSLV in June 2016
  • After deployment, all 88 satellites will be autonomously commissioned in batches. We expect Flock 3p to enter normal imaging operations in about three months
  • Each of the Flock 3p satellites—our 13th build—sports a 200 mbps downlink speed and is capable of collecting over 2 million km² per day

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Poland’s Biebrza National Park, protected by the Wetlands Convention, experiences certain disturbances in its water levels and water transfer, which could threaten its biodiversity.

Wetlands, as defined by the Ramsar Convention, include all lakes and rivers, swamps and marshes, wet grasslands, peat lands, oases, estuaries, deltas and tidal flats, mangroves and other coastal areas, coral reefs, and all human-made sites such as fish ponds, rice paddies, reservoirs and salt pans, among others.

While long regarded as wastelands, wetlands are now considered hugely fruitful ecosystems that contribute essential beneficial services to society. Providing water entry for agricultural and domestic purposes, wetlands enable farmers to grow crops in all seasons, thus increasing food availability. They supply grazing and watering for domestic and wild animals, and are a habitat for diverse flora and fauna, serving as a lifeline for migratory birds.

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Toulouse, 3 March 2017 – Airbus broadens the range of sensors used in its agricultural services, Farmstar and Fodder Production Index, with the Sentinel 2A and Sentinel 3A satellites of the European Copernicus programme. This improves the level of availability and enhances the quality of both services, with farmers reaping the benefits.

Farmstar, launched fifteen years ago, is a precision agricultural service based on remote sensing that provides key agronomic recommendations to more than 18,000 farmers in France for sustainable wheat, barley, triticale and rapeseed crop growing. Sentinel 2A ihas been operationally used since December 2016, whilesupplementing the SPOT and DMC constellation satellites and helping to elaborate recommendations which are issued throughout the growing season. Sentinel 2A will very shortly be joined by its twin, Sentinel 2B, thus doubling the acquisition capacity of the Sentinel 2 system and significantly improving the reliability of the Farmstar service.

The Airbus Fodder Production Index for pasture insurance is based on imagery acquired by the MODIS satellite every ten days. It enables agricultural insurers to monitor the status of grass growing throughout France and trigger the payment of compensation to livestock breeders. This can be done without having to resort to a visit by an expert in the event of a shortfall in grass production as a result of climatic hazards. Production of the index entails covering vast areas of land rapidly and on a regular basis. Starting January 2017, the MODIS data will gradually be replaced by data from the Sentinel 3A satellite, which offers images with richer spectral information. They guarantee regular acquisitions, while enhancing the quality of the vegetation maps produced to quantify variations in the annual production of pasture biomass.

Agriculture is the ideal market for satellite observation. It is a demanding field which requires monitoring at a pace dictated by the crop cycle. Both of these services proposed by Airbus rely on various satellites owned and operated by Airbus, as well as partner constellations. Thereby, a reliable and pertinent response can be provided to meet each need, maximising the chances of obtaining the right image at the right time, despite any cloud cover which could compromise imaging at the ideal moment in the crop development cycle.

(Azores, 23th February 2017). Since 1st of January 2017, the Horizon 2020 project Marine-EO has been officially started, aiming at the implementation of the first Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) for Earth Observation services.

Marine-EO applies to a vast array of ocean-related areas covering the development, testing and validation of demand-driven Earth Observation based services in the fields of both (i) maritime environment monitoring (i.e. Fish farm monitoring, Marine Protected Areas (MPA) monitoring, Harmful algal blooms detection, Oil spill detection, Iceberg open channel detection, etc.) and (ii) security (i.e. unusual activity detection, change detection of irregular immigrants, border permeability mapping etc.).

This endeavor will support the development of sustainable supply chains for delivery of downstream EO and Copernicus-enabled services that meet the needs of public authorities around Europe.

Comprising of 9 partners from Greece, Portugal, Spain and Norway, the Consortium within a time span of 47 months will set the processes for publishing a call for tender that will invite the EO industry to develop robust innovative solutions beyond the current state-of-the art, in three PCP phases (solution design, prototyping and operational development). The total subcontracting cost of the procurement amounts to 3,4M€.

Expectations are high among stakeholders operating with Copernicus Downstream Services regarding the project’s potential for incremental and/or radical innovation expected in the field of maritime awareness and consequent leverage effect on the already existing Copernicus Services and products.

During the first semester of 2017, the Lead Procurer (DGPM-PT) will launch a Prior Information Notice (PIN) for the organization of an Open Market Consultation in order to start a dialogue with potential tenderers and end-users, to fine tune the R&D tender scope according to market needs. By the end of 2017, the PCP call for tender will be published in all relevant European tender platforms and the project’s website. The submission of tenders will remain open for at least 60 days.

CONSORTIUM: “NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHDEMOKRITOS”, (GR) / DIRECAO-GERAL DE POLITICA DO MAR, (PT) / MINISTERIO DEL INTERIOR, (ES) / HELLENIC CENTRE FOR MARINE RESEARCH, (GR) / FUNDO REGIONAL PARA A CIENCIA E TECNOLOGIA, (PT) / KYSTVERKET VEST, (NO) / NATIONAL OBSERVATORY OF ATHENS, (GR) / EUROPEAN UNION SATELLITE CENTRE, (ES) / SINTEF OCEAN AS, (NO)

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(1st March 2017) A new project, bringing an even better value to Copernicus data, has started today. GeoVille is excited about the potential of the “Earth Observation Value Adding Services (EO VAS)” project and the cooperation with Sinergise – a GIS IT company situated in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The objective of EO VAS is to reshape the Earth Observation Value Chain by significantly simplifying development and delivery of Earth Observation Added Value Services. It is built around Sinergise’s engine for archiving, processing and distribution of satellite data, and GeoVille’s extensive set of processing algorithms.

EO VAS is focusing on agriculture and non-life insurance as well as on the entire optical EO space industry application domain field. The main delivery of the project is an EO-Toolset that has the ambition to become the first virtual market place for EO VAS, where all participants in the EO value chain (end-users, data and service providers) can benefit.

The project’s innovation hub will foster development of EO services, becoming a virtual meeting place for the exchange of new ideas and encourages experimenting with EO VAS. It will present a virtual business incubator for emerging EO oriented start-ups that lack the means to commercialise their EO services by themselves.

The H2020 financed project, will provide a pre-processing engine for other EO domain services, helping them to reduce pre-processing costs and to turn their attention into domain expertise and higher quality of their products.


Group Picture of the Kick-off meeting

Greek company Planetek Hellas will participate to the new European Space Agency study on hyperspectral imaging to support the 2nd generation of the Copernicus Programme. The study will assess the future needs in terms of hyperspectral imaging, coordinate those needs with planned satellite missions and evaluate what existing or future infrastructures are needed to fulfill these needs.

The company was awarded a Phase 1 grant under the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument to produce a feasibility study a space product called OP3C (On board Processing for Compression and Clouds Classification in hyperspectral satellite data). The OP3C is an electronic component (hardware and software), which will be installed in specific satellites (hyperspectral) and facilitate their operation through automatic data compression functions that can be executed as they orbit around the Earth.

Hyperspectral satellites use hyperspectral sensors that collect images of several wavelengths and combines them into a 3D image. The main users of the OP3C will Space Agencies, Satellite Operating Centers, Satellite manufacturers, Hyperspectral sensor manufacturers and Consulting companies for satellite mission planning.
Maria Ieronymakis, engineer at Planetek Hellas thinks that no matter how small you are, you can have a critical advantage on a specific and well-defined niche market and be one step ahead compared other sometimes to bigger players.

Founded in 2006 and based in Athens, Greece, Planetek Hellas has 9 different contracts with the European Space Agency and is the first Greek company to have ever signed a contract with the European Space Astronomy Centre (March 2013).

(By Lisa Cornish) For smart cities to succeed, they require real-time, location-based strategies, solutions and responses to effectively deliver the services that make cities work.

These include everything from health and education to sanitation collection.

To date, the limited capacity and capabilities of the developing world has meant that they have not had the same opportunities as developed countries for the development and consumerism of geospatial technologies. But that is quickly changing.

“The developing world is learning from past mistakes by the developed world, particularly in attempting to create a technology in search of problems to solve, and is ensuring that geospatial information and technologies are more ubiquitous and closely tied to addressing real world needs and development issues,” said Greg Scott, senior advisor for global geospatial information management in the U.N. Statistics Division.

Thanks to Sustainable Development Goals pushing for a stronger focus on data, analytics, and geospatial and earth observation technologies, there is increasing attention on achieving and monitoring development outcomes. And such technologies will be a critical component for future smart cities in developing countries.

Land tenure and rights, poverty eradication, education and welfare, food security, climate change, health, and disasters are among the policy areas developing nations can become smarter at responding to thanks to these improved tools.

“The effective use of geospatial technologies can have a transformational impact on many of humanity’s most significant challenges in the developing world,” said Scott, who leads the development of policies and strategies through his role as secretariat for the U.N. Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management.

A key partnership

While the U.N. has been leading the charge, NASA has the tools to assist.

In 2005 the agency launched World Wind, a web-based, open source platform facilitating development of apps using satellite, thematic and geospatial data for analysis and visualization.

Geospatial data links information to a graphic reference; earth observation data is environmental data collected from remote sensing and satellite technologies. They are brought together using geographic information systems — computer systems that can capture, store, display and analyze data related to its location.

To encourage new and innovative ways of delivering data management tools for cities, World Wind Project Manager Patrick Hogan established the NASA World Wind Europa Challenge in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano, Geo for All, Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition, Hub Innovazione Trentino and the Hungarian Association for Geo-information.

Beginning in 2013, the challenge is now an annual event with projects delivering solutions for earthquake and bushfire management, traffic monitoring and environmental and agricultural monitoring solutions.

Dr. Gábor Remetey-Fülöpp from the Hungarian Association for Geo-information has been working with the project since 2012 as part of the scientific committee, applying his expertise in computer-aided design, remote sensing, geospatial technology and cartography to help design challenge themes and evaluate projects for the NASA World Wind Europa Challenge to ensure it meets its lofty goals.

Remetey-Fülöpp told Devex that the wider availability of geospatial technology combined with the use of open earth observation data, open governmental policy and open source apps today makes it more accessible to developing countries. “The synergy of using EO, geospatial and statistical data on a spatial data infrastructure basis can greatly improve the quality of monitoring and reporting, but it can also enhance measures taken on local level, helping to guide actions taken to improve societal benefits,” he said. “The open data policy and a growing number of open source tools for data analysis, allows intelligent information to be closer to the decision-makers.”

Remote sensing, cloud computing, big data, apps, social media and location-based services are among the services Remetey-Fülöpp believes open new opportunities to deliver better services for smart cities, including in developing nations.

That is the topic both Remetey-Fülöpp and Scott will be discussing in their session at the 10th International Symposium of Digital Earth in Sydney on April 5.

“The technologies were originally seen as being able to organize data, create digital representations of the world, and to automate mapping within and across agencies and enterprises,” Scott explained. But he says it has evolved to become a “major disruptor of change and much more consumer based.”

World Wind, GIS and the SDGs

The SDGs will be a driving force for implementing smart technology and solutions within developing countries. The U.N.’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development calls for inclusive social progress, environmental sustainability and economic development by 2030. It also calls for greater accountability than that experienced under the Millennium Development Goals.

“There is considerable emphasis on measuring and monitoring with good policy, science, technology and especially data,” Scott explained. “The 2030 agenda specifically demands the need for new data acquisition and integration approaches and captures specific references to the need for high-quality, timely, reliable and disaggregated data, including earth observations and geospatial information in the area of follow up and review.”

Enhanced capacity-building support for developing countries — including least developed countries and small island developing states — will also help create smarter and sustainable cities. High-quality, timely and reliable data on income, gender, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability, geographic location and other characteristics have been identified as a priority, according to Scott.

But prioritizing and gathering data will require a dramatic shift in how development programs typically operate.

“Achieving these outcomes, and in such a short timeframe, will not only require transformation in how we think of sustainable development, but will also require transformation — a digital transformation — in how we are able to measure and monitor progress towards their achievement with new sources of data,” Scott said.

It will not just be traditional or official data to make this work; citizen-centric data will also be critical for evidence-based policy and decision-making. This is where World Wind comes in.

“World Wind is a web-based, open source platform facilitating development of apps using EO, thematic and geospatial data for analysis and visualization,” Remetey-Fülöpp said.

In the context of the SDGs, he said World Wind provides access to features needed to provide decision-making support on indicators and targets as defined in the 2030 agenda. “Accurate virtual globe visualization greatly facilitates understanding, which is key factor in the decision-making, especially in time-critical conditions,” Remetey-Fülöpp said.

Once measurements and data associated with SDG indicators are analyzed and visualized, decision-makers can begin building resilient cities and settlements. “It should be mentioned, World Wind applicability is also evident for other priority engagement areas as climate change, disaster risk reduction and ecosystem accounting,” Remetey-Fülöpp said.

In 2017, World Wind will turn to smart cities

The ability for NASA’s World Wind to assist in building smart cities of the future will be the focus of its public engagements in 2017.

In March at the 19th Conference of the Del Bianco Foundation in Florence, NASA and the European Space Agency will be launching DelBianco CitySmart, a new suite of tools built on World Wind to improve operations of smart cities through improved operations, including the management of urban infrastructure. “Any city will be able to continually tailor and advance functionalities serving their urban management needs, with an integrated system meant to increase awareness, efficiency, sustainability and quality of urban life,” Remetey-Fülöpp said

Smart cities will also be the theme for the 2017 NASA World Wind Europa Challenge this August, where experts will share ideas for open source apps that are expected to address urban management needs such as transportation, power, water, pollution, waste management and urban planning. And Remetey-Fülöpp anticipates that developing countries will respond well to the web-based, open source smart city apps. “Using openly accessible relevant EO data, especially if combined with citizen collected data, it will continually improve cost-effectiveness of delivering services.”

But he says the development of smart city technology using World Wind does not necessarily need to be built with developing countries in mind.

“All cities need essentially the same tools to manage urban infrastructure,” Remetey-Fülöpp explained. “What if we established an open source platform that allowed cities to share the functionalities each of them need? And what if the academic community as well as small and medium enterprise were challenged to work with their cities to build those solutions? Solutions developed by the more affluent cities would be entirely accessible to every other city. This way a world could advance in a collective enterprise advancing solutions they all need.”

World Wind, he said, is simply an open source platform that allows this to happen.
Barriers to helping developing communities become smart cities of the future

According to the 2017 Global Geospatial Industry Outlook, the geospatial industry is today worth $500 billion. Beyond 2017, Scott and Remetey-Fülöpp believe the value of geospatial technology to make sense of development data will continue to grow.

“As the digital data ecosystem grows it seems that we now have data everywhere about everything and that we have the capability to explore and analyze every aspect of our planet at amazing levels of temporal and spatial resolutions,” Scott said.

And Remetey-Fülöpp believes that to cope with the unprecedented population growth in some parts of the world, progressive governments will require a spatially enabled and oriented society, with citizens empowered by EO and geospatial infrastructure tools, to deliver the services and smarts required.

But for developing countries, there are still hurdles to overcome.

“There is a lot of infrastructure required for a city to be ‘smart’ and much of that infrastructure — internet bandwidth is a simple example — does not readily exist in developing countries or their many fragmented cities,” Scott said.

To tackle this problem, the U.N. is defining smart cities of the future in developing countries as cities that are smart, sustainable and resilient. “This makes it much easier for developing countries to conceptualize,” Scott said. Geospatial technology still remains a critical component for these cities.

In Kunming, China, from May 10 to 12, the UN-GGIM will be convening an international forum discussing smart cities in developing countries as a platform for discussing priority issues and the adoption of reliable, timely and quality geospatial information to shape these cities. For these efforts to succeed, Remetey-Fülöpp said enhanced partnership, cooperation and capacity building is required — and the onus may be on Scott. “The UN-GGIM board and its regional entities in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania, serve a critical advisory role and network for the agenda 2030. It can effectively address the essential geospatial-related information management issues.”

For Scott and the UN-GGIM, a constant challenge is that geospatial information as a means to inform policy and decision-making is not yet mainstreamed and accepted enough, despite its long history. “It still tends to be viewed by many decision-makers as a back-room techno-geek solution and is not well understood,” Scott explained. “Yet, it is widely acknowledged that implementing the SDGs, and measuring and monitoring their progress, will require new and large amounts of data, and transformative change and collaborative approaches to link many types of data with the one thing they have in common — a geographic location.”

And despite the hurdles, the aims are grand: universal smart cities.

“To succeed in our global development aspirations we need to not only reach the developing countries, we need to reach the poorest of the poor in the least developed countries, and we need to give them a voice and location so as to ensure that no one is left behind,” Scott said.

Over six weeks, Devex — along with our partners — will explore what it takes to build a successful smart city, how climate resilient and environmentally friendly infrastructure and technologies are being implemented, and how actors in the global development community are working together toward common goals and engaging local communities in an inclusive way. Join us as we examine what it takes to create our smart cities of the future by tagging #SmartCities and @Devex.

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The quantity and quality of satellite-geodetic measurements of tectonic deformation have increased dramatically over the past two decades improving our ability to observe active tectonic processes. We now routinely respond to earthquakes using satellites, mapping surface ruptures and estimating the distribution of slip on faults at depth for most continental earthquakes. Studies directly link earthquakes to their causative faults allowing us to calculate how resulting changes in crustal stress can influence future seismic hazard. This revolution in space-based observation is driving advances in models that can explain the time-dependent surface deformation and the long-term evolution of fault zones and tectonic landscapes.

The study of active tectonics is primarily concerned with the deformation of the Earth’s surface. This process results in the growth of mountains, rifting of continents and evolution of the geomorphic landscape. We aim to understand the material properties and processes that control the distribution of strain in the Earth’s crust, from mobile belts to rigid cratons. An important consequence of the movement of the Earth’s crust is that the slow accumulation of strain in the cold, brittle upper part of the crust (which builds up over hundreds to thousands of years) must eventually be released, often in earthquakes. Understanding the fundamental processes of tectonics will contribute to mitigating the growing risk of an increasingly urbanised population exposed to such hazards1.

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