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GeoVille and its international partners DHI GRAS and ITC are currently cooperating with national authorities in Uganda to develop and implement a user-friendly wetland monitoring system. The system will provide an operational capacity to generate spatial time series statistical data for inventorying, monitoring and quantitatively reporting on national wetland resources using Earth observation data.

Effective reporting of progress towards indicators that measure, monitor and report progress on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their associated targets are getting more and more important. This will require the use of multiple types of data, including traditional national accounts, household surveys and routine administrative data as well as new, nationwide sources of data outside the national statistical system. This can be provided through satellite Earth observation and geospatial information.

The project is consistent with the upcoming monitoring requirements in the context of SDG indicator 6.6.1 “Change in the extent of water-related ecosystems over time”. It also recognizes the critical importance of supporting developing countries in strengthening the capacity of national statistical offices and data systems to ensure access to high quality, timely, reliable and disaggregated data.

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TRE ALTAMIRA together with E-geos have made thousands of images from the PST project ( Piano Straordinario di Telerilevamento ), which went live in 2008, years prior to the launch of Sentinel-1 satellites. The PST results are now presented in the article: Analysis of surface deformations over the Italian territory by interferometric processing of ERS, Envisat and COSMO-SkyMed radar data.

A forward-looking project. Using InSAR technology and more than 20,000 images from ERS, Envisat and COSMO-SkyMed satellites, the study has mapped unstable areas over Italy, detecting ground deformations due to subsidence, landslides, earthquakes and volcanic activities in a period covering 22 years (1992-2014).

Ground motion was traditionally considered a local phenomenon, and as such, its impact has been handed at a local level. The increasing importance of the need for a regular monitoring has resulted in more and more initiatives moving up to a national level and joining forces with local authorities. A detailed analysis of this nationwide study reveals a huge amount of information on the different phenomena affecting the territory, enabling a better characterisation of vulnerable areas with known instabilities. It provides a more accurate identification and mapping of threatened areas. It can also help establish that areas once considered at risk have recovered their stability.

Land management. The response to the high-priority, societal need of better understanding and mitigating terrain motions affecting our people, territory and economy has to be proactive rather than reacting only after an issue arises.

The new Sentinel-1 era. Today, multi-hazard ground motion studies with InSAR can benefit from the new Sentinel-1 satellite platform, specifically designed for ground deformation monitoring over large areas and operated by ESA.

A near-real time monitoring program of ground deformation. TRE ALTAMIRA is making the transition from historical satellite analyses of radar imagery to a near-real time monitoring programs at a regional and national scale. Up-to-date displacement information is routinely provided to clients relying on our advanced satellite InSAR technique (SqueeSAR™), our broad computing capacity and free access to timely Sentinel-1 images.

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Blockchain technology is said to be the biggest innovation in computer science and it is predicted to revolutionize the economy world. If you want your stock to be successful, you should do something with Blockchain.

This mocking advice is currently circulating on the net. These days everyone is talking about Blockchain, but no one is really doing it. The Munich-based start-up cloudeo is doing it. Cloudeo sells geodata, plans to go public and raised millions in the pre-IPO phase. On top of that their own cryptocurrency is to be launched on the market.

Cloudeo does not only plan an ICO, but also an IPO: The start-up will be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in Canada in the first half of the year. Also in the first six months of the year, an ICO will launch for its Cloudeo Blockchain tokens.

In the course of a pre-IPO round, the company has just collected five million euros for a valuation of 41.5 million euros from tech investors from America and Europe. Last summer, the Munich-based company already collected 2.4 million euros in Series A.

Cloudeo operates a marketplace for ready to use geoservices, IT and software. They specialize in the analysis and trading of geodata from multiple vendors and in making this data accessible and useful for a broader public. The start-up collects data from satellites, weather balloons or smartphones and sells protected access to the data. These are then used, for example, by customers from agriculture, logistics and even in the gaming sector or by IoT devices.

Cloudeo are taking they pursue accessibility and transparency to the next level now. They have launched a blockchain venture to be on the forefront of data collection and the provision of location services critical to expanding the Internet of Things and the development of Artificial Intelligence. Currently, they are setting up the non-profit organization CBN Foundation (short for “Cloudeo Blockchain Network Foundation”) and are planning to issue tokens for an ICO. The foundation wants to involve users with the blockchain technology by means of smart contracts with very small amounts in the data they generate. In other words, cloudeo is creating a decentralized network of providers, users and collectors of geodata.

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Since 2015, VisioTerra is involved in Proba-V MEP (Mission Exploitation Platform). VisioTerra is developing enhanced processing and visualization tools with two services of automatic detection for fires and burnt areas.

By computing the difference between the bands of the image of the day and “the rolling mean” of these bands, one define a change index. This index together with other criteria are analysed in a decision tree to detect fires or burnt areas.

This automatic classification has been successfully applied for the detection of fires in Spain, Guinea and Sudan.

Scope of these preliminariy studies is to set up a multi-sensor alarm system for civil protection, farmers, NGOs, citizen… After a qualification phase, e-mail or SMS will be sent to the people for events occuring within their area of interest.

Download the document in PDF format

Since the collision, Sanchy oil spill is monitored by the various Sentinel satellites. The right image is the view #3 of Sentinel-2 HR optical observed on 18 January 2018 on 02:20:21 GMT showing a 100 km x 200 km slick around the sinking point.

Except in case of specular reflection (reflection of the Sun on the surface of the sea), it is very rare to distinguish a oil slick on the surface of the sea. Here we observe the intense combustion of the boat and its cargo a few hours before its sinking.

This document published by VisioTerra illustrates the potential of Sentinel missions to monitor the oil spill occurring in China Sea.

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Gisat leads the SUCE project aiming at implementation of tools helping the EO community retrieve and effectively select optimal set of Sentinel 2 products based on tailored metadata analysis.

The main objectives of the SUCE project was to define a concept, an architecture and provide a prototype permitting to effectively select and download EO products from identified PDGS on the basis on advanced user criteria and analytics needs. Through the enhanced metadata analysis (cloud masks) the prototype permits to derive optimal set of EO products suitable for various applications (e.g. any mapping task where cloud free coverage is needed), avoiding both manual filtering and transfer of useless data.

The SUCE prototype was delivered at the end of 2016 as a web portal based tool. The tool was successfully demonstrated to Copernicus Services Account Managers and the discussions led to the definition of an activity for the upgrade and operational utilisation of the SUCE tool in support to the generation optical High-Resolution coverages of EEA-39 (HR_IMAGE_2015 dataset).

The main objectives of this follow-on activity (named SUCE-C, SUCE for Copernicus) were:

  • Put in place an automatic end-to-end processing chain able to ingest HR_IMAGE_2015 dataset metadata along with gaps layers;
  • Discover, access and download Sentinel 2 metadata from Copernicus DataHub (CopHub) catalogue directly, over predefined area of interest and time of interest;
  • Process available Sentinel 2 passes to derive most suitable coverage over the gap areas;
  • Improve SUCE algorithms so the users can choose multiple coverage types best meeting their needs;
  • Provide output packages including area of interest polygons associated with cloud free Sentinel 2 products, disseminated through Copernicus Services DataHub (CopHub) catalogue;
  • Deploy developed tools in ESA infrastructure – Payload Data Networks and Systems (PDNS) and provide it as a service for the EO Payload Data Segment (EO-PDS).

The SUCE project was funded by the European Space Agency under the GSTP programme. The project begun in February 2015 and ended in January 2017. The project continuation (SUCE-C) is funded under Copernicus DWH 2014-2020, started in July 2017, with the duration of 7 months, until January 2018. The project is led by Gisat as prime contractor and it is supported by TERRASIGNA as subcontractor.

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.
Tel: + 420 271741935 Fax: + 420 271741936
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Airborne LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), is an active remote sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges (variable distances) to the Earth. These light pulses, combined with other data recorded by the airborne system, generate reliable and precise three-dimensional (3D) information, in terms of point cloud, about the shape of the Earth and its surface characteristics. A LIDAR instrument principally consists of a laser, a scanner, and a specialized GPS receiver. Airplanes are the most commonly used platforms for acquiring LIDAR topographic data over broad areas. An airborne LIDAR mission process is called Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS).

Impact

Compared to traditional photogrammetry, GPS and land surveying, LIDAR provide: 1) higher and homogenous accuracy, 2) fast acquisition of massive data (point clouds) and processing, 3) minimum human dependence, 4) weather/light independence, 5) canopy and vegetation penetration through LIDAR pulses, 6) higher data density (very dense point clouds), 7) Ground Control Points (GCPs) independence, i.e., few GCPs are needed for the georeference process and for the qualitative and quantitative control (this makes LIDAR ideal for mapping inaccessible and featureless areas), 8) additional information such intensity, multiple returns, etc., and 9) cost-effectiveness for big covered areas, e.g., for national/public work studies or services. However, several research approaches have been proposed the recent years that fuse LIDAR and aerial imagery to exploit both: the good geometric quality of ALS and the spectral image information for object detection and feature extraction, forest canopy modeling, 3D mapping and reconstruction, 3D city modeling in terms of Level of Details (LoDs), smart cities, BIMs, etc. Despite the constant technological development of computer vision, computer graphics and aerial/space technology, the accurate, reliable and rapid 3D reconstruction of complex scenes such the industrial ones still remains challenging.

Concept

In this study a multi-modal data fusion approach is implemented, that is LIDAR and aerial RGB imagery, to create 3D modern cartographic backgrounds for smart and safe management of industrial areas. A complex industrial area of 4.3 km2 near at Patras city, Greece was used as case study.

Technical Details

At first step, the LIDAR point clouds and the aerial RGB imagery were simultaneously acquired over the area of interest. The adjustment of neighboring LIDAR strips was firstly performed through strip alignment and then a georeference process using ground control points (GCPs) and check points (CPs) was carried out afterwards. The LIDAR point clouds were classified and refined to extract building, vegetation and ground points. The ground points were used to extract the corresponding Digital Terrain Model (DTM) of the area of interest. Also an aerial triangulation of the aerial imagery was conducted via bundle adjustment using GPS/INS data and GCPs/CPs. Finally the orthoimages of the area of interest were generated using the LIDAR/DTM. Concerning the used GCPs and CPs: 1) were consisted of characteristic points (e.g., pitches, corners at buildings, etc), 2) were measured by the ComNav Τ300 receiver station both on GPS/RTK and GPS/Relative static modes, and 3) their coordinates were calculated using the GNSS network of reference stations of SmartNet Europe/MetricaNET.

Point density varied considerably over the whole block depending on the LIDAR strip overlap, i.e., 5 points/m2 and 30 points/m2 for regions covered by only one strip and more than one strip respectively. Multiple echoes and intensities were recorded. The ground sample distance (GSD) of the orthoimages was 10 cm. Several 2D and 3D feature/spatial data products were extracted using the Erdas Imagine software (Raster and Point cloud tools, Imagine Photogrammetry, Terrain analysis tool and VirtualGIS tool) such: 1) true-ortho intensity images, 2) Digital Surfaces Models (DSMs), Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) and RGB orthoimages, 3) 3D LIDAR point clouds coloured by the orthoimages, 4) inspection of critical infrastructures such power lines and street lighting network, 5) automatic detection of buildings and 3D modeling in LoD1, and 6) aspect and slope maps of the DSMs. The results demonstrate the utility and the functionality of LIDAR points clouds for high-level 3D reconstruction of complex scenes such the industrial areas. The fusion with the aerial imagery contributed to the extraction of appropriate cartographic backgrounds in order to potentially feed smart management systems such as BIMs.

3D LIDAR point cloud coloured by the intensity (left); True-ortho intensity image (right)
Superimposition of the DSM to the orthoimage
3D LIDAR point cloud coloured by the orthoimage
Inspection of power lines and street lighting network
3D building models in LoD1 visualized in a 3D Virtual GIS environment
Slope (top) and aspect (bottom) maps of the DSM

Contact info
o Contact person : Maltezos Evangelos, Betty Charalampopoulou
o E-mail: mail@geosystems-hellas.gr

16 January 2018. Astrosat, one of the leading businesses in Europe’s space exploitation industry, has formed a partnership with Irish start-up DroneSAR- Search and Rescue, to incorporate drone software with Astrosat’s Recovery and Protection in Disaster (RAPID) system.

The RAPID system is designed to provide intelligent situational awareness and support in the context of disaster scenarios to aid, inform and support decisions that are made in the operational theatre.

Steve Lee, CEO of Astrosat, said: “DroneSAR’s technology will fit beautifully with our RAPID system. With RAPID’s ability to provide up-to-date mapping images in less than three hours, and the ability to interlace footage from drones, we are giving first responders the most detailed picture available.”

DroneSAR recently won the Copernicus Master Service Challenge European Space Week in Tallin, Estonia. Oisin McGrath, CEO and Co-Founder of DroneSAR, said: “The software, a result of 18 months of development with input from Search and Rescue (SAR) teams across the country, perfectly with the RAPID system. It allows first responders a greater depth of overview, through the addition of drone footage to the interface. We plan to integrate both platforms to give near-real-time satellite imagery to both unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) pilots and to Command and Control for better informed decision making”.

DroneSAR was developed through Donegal Mountain Rescue who were chosen as one of four European pilot tests sites by DJI, the market leader in consumer drone technology, and EENA the European Emergency Numbers Association. The software was refined based on the results of this project.

The company provides software that enables commercially available drones to maintain autonomous search patterns based on waypoint missions or user-defined search ‘boxes’, reducing risk to search personnel, improving situational awareness and increasing the chance of finding people in distress, all at a fraction of the cost of a SAR helicopter. It has a Share Location function, which allows pilots to instantly share locations to all team members as the drone flies.

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Satellite, sighting towers and community collaboration. Inside the Alta Murgia National Park, the fight against fires is done with integrated actions and, from this year, with cutting-edge technological equipment, which allow the implementation of prevention activities, as a support for active struggle and post-event investigation.

It was presented on 10 November 2017, in Bari, Italy, the report on the burnt areas identified and monitored during the summer of the last year in the area of Parco Nazionale dell’Alta Murgia, Italy.

The most critical season for wildfires and forest fires is summer. The first accurate information about the areas involved, derived from monitoring campaigns is available in several months. This is not the case for the Alta Murgia National Park, which this year has adopted satellite technologies to carry out an analysis in a very short time. The information, in fact, was collected and made available after only two months, compared to the usual 12/18 months of waiting, thanks to the adoption of Rheticus® Wildfires service, developed by Planetek Italia, a cloud-based service which automatically process Copernicus Sentinel-2 data to deliver timely and accurate information to managers of Parks and Public Administration involved in safeguarding of forest.

Wildfires facts

2017 will be remembered as a “hot” year globally, California and Portugal for weeks have been covered by fires that have burned thousands of hectares. Even Italy continues to burn and until October in Piedmont fires as well as burning hundreds of hectares of forest have lapped population centers and infrastructures. In order to counter this phenomenon, a series of initiatives are adopted that, on the whole, allow us to limit something which appears, for various reasons, inevitable.

Parks have the main function of defining the rules that regulate the activities in the park area and an appropriate monitoring activity, can significantly affect the success in the fight against fires, which involves several institutional entities. In Puglia region, in addition to the Park Authorities, the regional administration with the Civil Protection and its ARIF Agency, the Carabinieri, have inherited some of the functions that were carried out by the State Forestry Corps, the Fire Brigade, the Municipalities.

The strategy of Alta Murgia National Park

Alta Murgia National Park in this context has activated a series of initiatives to prevent wildfires from starting and, in case of start, to activate rapid intervention teams.

As a first activity, the Park has committed itself to creating a network of relationships with people and organizations operating in the park. The goal was to build awareness of the importance of protecting the territory in which they operate, a territory which represents a source of income as well as the place in which they live. This awareness plays an essential role in the success of any initiative, including the fight against fires.

From the point of view of prevention, a series of rules have been activated, some of which are also accepted by the regional legislation, which regulate the activities in the park, also of an economic nature, in order to prevent activities that may provoke or induce the creation of fires. These include the ban on the collection of mushrooms and asparagus in the areas covered by the fire, the regulation of the burning of stubble, to mention those that probably have a greater potential impact.

For the early detection of outbreaks a network of observation points has been created that are widespread throughout the territory. These points are continuously monitored, throughout the fire season, by operators through the activation of agreements with voluntary associations, which are able to activate the alarm at the first signs of the fire. In some critical areas, video surveillance systems have been activated that bring together images acquired by cameras to an operations center that is able to interpret them and identify the outbreaks at birth.

Satellite monitoring

The Alta Murgia National Park this year has adopted, – the first example in Italy, followed by the Majella National Park – a satellite monitoring service with the aim of increasing investigation and monitoring capabilities of burned areas over time.

A continuous monitoring service was implemented using Rheticus® Wildfires developed by Planetek Italia, which is able to automatically process the images immediately after they have been collected by the European Sentinel-2 satellite constellation.

The activation of the service allowed the creation of a report on the areas covered by the fire in the Alta Murgia National Park area in the period July-September 2017. The processing of satellite data allowed on a weekly basis, the identification and contouring of burnt areas, the classification of events based on the degree of severity of the damages caused by the fires on the vegetation and theeir allocation by Municipality of reference.

All these are fundamental information, which allows a clear and detailed picture of the extent and size of the phenomenon, useful for planning and implementing actions to prevent and manage the areas covered by the fire, to make preliminary economic assessments of the interventions to be carried out.

Facts and figures of wildfires in summer 2017 in Alta Murgia National Park

In the period July 7th – October 5th, 2017, the areas covered by the fire amounted to 270 hectares.
There are 16 fires registered, 3 of which with an area of about 50 hectares. These large-scale fires occurred two in August and one in September. The municipality with the largest area covered by the fire is Andria with 70 hectares, followed by Corato and Minervino Murge.
The types of species most affected were the grazing areas and arable land for 132 and 44 hectares respectively. The wooded areas affected by fires were about 35 hectares and of these slightly less than one hectare presented a high degree of severity of damage to the vegetation.

Read more
Planetek Italia website
Alta Murgia National Park website
• TV News on RAI TGR Puglia of 10 november h 14,00 and h 19,30

Bari, Italy, 8th January 2018.
Planetek has signed two Distribution Agreements with the companies Twenty First Century Aerospace Technology (21AT Asia) and MDA Geospatial Services for the distribution of global imagery collected by TripleSat and RADARSAT-2 satellites.

21AT Asia is the provider of the commercial high-resolution optical TripleSat Earth imagery. The constellation consists of three identical satellites and imagery is available at 0.8 m resolution. The satellites are 120° apart around the same orbit and are able to target daily any point of the Earth with an acquisition capacity of half million km² per day.

MDA Geospatial Services is a Canadian corporation providing high-resolution RADARSAT-2 imagery. RADARSAT-2 is the highest-capacity commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite in the world, providing images of the Earth through darkness and clouds at spatial resolutions ranging from 1 to 100 m, providing coverage from 144 to 250.000 km² in a single scene.

The satellite provides a range of imaging options, including co-polarization (HH), vertical co-polarization (VV) and cross-polarization (HV or VH).
This new agreement adds further opportunities to Planetek capacity to meet customer monitoring needs in a wide range of application and with unprecedent ability to provide timely and customized geospatial products and services.

Planetek Italia clients can count on data and services derived by world’s leading satellite data providers, thanks to the distribution agreements signed also with Airbus Defence & Space, DigitalGlobe, Planet Labs and Deimos Imaging.

For further information contact Planetek Italia at Tel. +39.0809644200 or by mail at: sales @ planetek.it
Read the news here www.planetek.it