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GISAT experts have supported ESA by participation at an Asian Development Bank (ADB) seminar on space technology and GIS hold in Manila, Philippines.

ESA aims to gradually mainstream Earth Observation services in the daily practices of multilateral development banks and international financial institutions and currently has collaborations in place with the World Bank, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (UN-IFAD).

Further, the contacts with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) have been also established and as a first step towards future ESA support to ADB activities, ESA organised the dedicated seminar demonstrating European and Canadian EO services capacities and solutions in selected thematic areas: Ecosystems, Forestry, Urban, Geohazards / Risks, Maritime Surveillance and Climate Resilience and Proofing. This seminar complemented to series of space technology seminars organized by the ADB together with JAXA, to raise the general awareness of space technology and EO applications in the bank.

Based on the previous experiences in the Urban thematic area and also due to previous successful provisions of EO services to this category of users GISAT experts had the opportunity to cover the theme of Urban EO applications during the seminar.

The seminar presented an overview and key examples of European and Canadian EO capabilities based on existing and planned EO missions (ESA and national), demonstrated key competences of the EO service industry and made a positive impact on ESA and ADB future cooperation.


Urban growth trend monitoring service

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

ReSAC experts successfully provided methodological support to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food in Bulgaria, with respect to the annual assessment of the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS QA), as called by Article 6 of commission regulation 1122/2009. The positive impact of the correct performance of the quality procedure was an importance prerequisite for the sound analysis of the LPIS QA results.

Following a request from the Bulgarian Ministry of Agriculture and Food (MAF), ReSAC concluded a contract for provision of training and assistance to the “Agriculture and Land Tenure” department of the Ministry in relation to the implementation of the quality assessment of the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS). This quality assessment, called LPIS QA, is required by Article 6 of Commission Regulation (EC) No 1122/2009, and has to be performed on annual basis by each EU Member State.

ReSAC provided assistance in the implementation of the technical guidance and methodology developed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, considering the Bulgarian LPIS model and specific conditions for eligibility of the agriculture land in the country. Furthermore, ReSAC experts delivered a specific training session and on-the-job support in land cover mapping and image interpretation for the purpose of the reference parcel inspection. Finally, the results of the Model Conformance Test Suite (MTS) and the Executable Test Suite (ETS) have been jointly analyzed and recommendations for the further upgrade of the LPIS were issued.

The importance of the LPIS comes from the requirement that it must channel all area based aids provided in the scope of the EU Common Agriculture Policy (EU CAP), the corresponding financial value of which exceeds €40bn for 2012. For this specific purpose, LPIS quality can roughly be defined as the ability of the system to fulfill two explicit LPIS functions:

  • the unambiguous localization of all declared agricultural parcels by farmer and inspectors,
  • and the quantification of all eligible area for crosschecks during the administrative controls by the paying agency.

Failure of an LPIS in the unambiguous localization induces risks for double declaration of land. Inadequate quantification of eligible area renders the crosschecks ineffective for preventing and identifying over-declarations by farmers. Both failures involve financial risks for the EU Funds.

Furthermore, any well functioning LPIS greatly facilitates operations by farmers, inspectors and paying agencies, resulting in a better overall performance.

The positive impact of the correct performance of the quality procedure by the Bulgarian administration following the assistance provided by ReSAC was an importance prerequisite for the sound analysis of the LPIS QA results. Some outcomes and highlights of that joint work are to be presented on the annual LPIS workshop on 14-15 of October in Baveno, Italy, organized by DG JRC.

Source ReSAC

DHI GRAS recently entered into a framework agreement with the European Environmental Agency (EEA) on consultancy services within Geospatial Information Systems (GIS). It covers support and consultancy with respect to advanced image analysis and will be running for the next four years.

“The EEA is a focal point for environmental mapping in Europe,” says Mikael Kamp Sørensen, Managing Director (DHI GRAS). “We are proud to have been selected to support EEA based on our expertise in environmental mapping. With more than 10 years of practical experience, we can contribute with considerable expertise related to processing and analysis of satellite images and other geospatial data.”

The EEA is an agency of the European Union (EU), tasked with the provision of sound, independent and reliable environmental information. EEA undertakes important work related to the European Copernicus programme – previously known as Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES). The GMES/Copernicus (2011-2013) Initial Operations of the land monitoring service (or ‘GIO’ land) prioritise multi-purpose information common to a large user community.

This includes:

  • land cover/land cover change at various scales and periodicities
  • biophysical variables for dynamic land monitoring
  • improved access to reference data

Rasmus Borgstrøm, Project Manager (DHI GRAS) elaborates on the contract; “Our team is specialised in advanced image processing. We look forward to supporting the EEA with our expertise in handling and analysing satellite imagery as well as other raster datasets throughout the next four years.”

Please contact DHI GRAS for further information.

Edisoft S.A. celebrates the beginning of a new era by moving its HQ to a new office in Paço de Arcos on the western side of Lisbon. This new era was officially presented last July 17th in a ceremony held with the presence of the Secretary of State of National Defense, Mrs. Berta Cabral, the three chiefs of Staff (Navy, Army and Portuguese Air Forces) and Mr. Pierre Mathieu.

During this ceremony, it was highlighted the new competencies and skillsets brought into the company as well the new export business opportunities that this reinforcement made by Thales, one of the world’s foremost industrial players in Defence and Aerospace, opens to the Portuguese industrial sector.

After successful negotiations with the company’s shareholders, Empordef, Empresa Portuguesa de Defesa (SGPS) and Navegação Aérea de Portugal, NAV Portugal, E.P.E., Thales strengthened its original 30% stake to a 65% controlling stake. The remaining shares continue to be owned by the other two shareholders, Empordef and NAV Portugal, each one with 17.5%.

This position further strengthens Thales’s already strong position in the country recognizing key synergies in the capabilities between the two organisations. Commenting on this significant deal, João Araújo, Thales Portugal Country Director said: “Edisoft is a reference enterprise of the Portuguese Aerospace and Defence sectors and we are delighted to have joined forces. As we continue to consolidate our position as a leading player in the Portuguese market it is important to further strengthen our local engineering team in order to reinforce our competitiveness in the local market.”

The new site offers outstanding conditions and reinforces the commitment of the Shareholders with the future of Edisoft, after the strategic move done by Thales with the reinforcement of its shareholding position in Edisoft.

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Until recently, the United States’ Landsat-5 satellite was a key source of medium-resolution data for the Australian government, available through Geoscience Australia. That is, until imaging from the long depended upon satellite was suspended in 2011, and decommissioned in January 2013.

The Landsat-8 mission wasn’t launched until February 2013, and wasn’t fully operational until the end of May, leaving a period of two years where only Landsat-7 was able to collect imagery.

To address the shortfall in access to medium-resolution data between the loss of Landsat-5, and the launch of Landsat-8, Geoscience Australia has acquired large regional coverage of UK-DMC2 satellite imagery from DMC International Imaging Ltd (DMCii)…

Read the full article here

Through the acquisition of EXEO, a company based in the French Basque Country, CLS’s subsidiary Novacom Services has become the French market leader in geolocation services for vehicles in the cleaning sector.

CLS’s subsidiary Novacom Services specializes in geolocation services for terrestrial mobile units in the road transport, cleaning, humanitarian and building sectors. Through the acquisition of EXEO, which specializes in software publishing, route optimization and the geolocation of household waste trucks, Novacom Services has not only made an immediate technological leap forward but has also bolstered its essentially private customer portfolio (SITA, PAPREC, etc.) through the addition of EXEO’s public-sector customers (local authorities such as Strasbourg, Oléron, Perpignan and Lorient). As a Group now tracks more than 36,000 vehicles around the world in real time and processes more than 3 million messages a day. Despite the difficult economic context, CLS has again carried through a successful operation for external growth, in line with its strategy to position its subsidiary as the European geolocation leader in its target markets.

CLS, which is a subsidiary of CNES and IFREMER, is a global provider of services in the fields of locat and environmental data collection, as well as ocean surveillance and observation.

It is best known as the operator of the ARGOS system and currently employs 470 people in its 17 offices and subsidiaries.

The company operates in more than 100 countries. It processes the data from approximately 22,000 Argos transmitters, determines and publishes ocean topography to within a few centimeters in 48 hours, and processes 15,000 radar images a year, mainly for maritime safety. In 2012, CLS had a turnover of €79M, an increase of more than 8% compared to 2011, and an operating margin of more than 9%.

CLS set up Novacom Services in 2002 to specialize in geolocation and data collection (CLS’s core business) for industrial vehicles (goods transport, public works, services to local authorities, management of fleets, energy and waste, etc.). In 2008, to help develop its new subsidiary, CLS invited the Italian company Téléspazio, a subsidiary of Finmeccanica and Thalès, to take a 40% share in the capital of Novacom Services. In 2009, Novacom Services became European eader in the trailer geolocation sector
y purchasing General Electric’s onboard telematics activity, TIP Trailer Services. In 11 years, thanks to carefully-planned and controlled growth, Novacom Services has developed strongly.

With the addition of its new subsidiary, EXEO, Novacom Services expects to achieve a turnover in excess of €15.3M in 2013, with a staff of 35 working in Toulouse, France (the Group’s headquarters), 25 in the Netherlands and 15 in Bidart (headquarters of EXEO) on the French Atlantic coast.

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In June the USGS announced the availability of Landsat 8 data.

Today we are happy to announce the support of the new (meta)data format introduced with Landsat 8 by BEAM. This enables the user now to open and work with Landsat 4/5 ™, Landsat 7 (ETM+) and Landsat 8 (OLI/TIRS) in GeoTIFF format; while Landsat 5 ™ is also supported in FAST format. You can get the latest version (1.4) of the reader by means of the module manager found in VISAT’s help menu.

more info

(October 2013) ScanEx, announced the launch of the innovation partnership program “Open Landscape”. The program will officially start on October 1, 2013. Founding members of the “Open Landscape” program include: ScanEx Research and Development Center and NGO “Transparent World” together with the World Bank, the World Resources Institute,members of the Global Forest Watch 2.0 and the Global Tiger Initiative. The program is supported by DigitalGlobe, NASA, and other satellite imagery data providers.

In June 2013, ScanEx RDC and DigitalGlobe signed an agreement under which the Russian and foreign participants of the “Open Landscape” program will be able to view highly detailed archived images acquired from the WorldView-2 satellite. Detailed plans of the first stage of the “Open Landscape” partnership program were presented and discussed with potential users during the 6th International Conference “Earth from Space – the Most Effective Solutions”.

The “Open Landscape” program will engage local universities and non-profit organizations in Russia. They will also include organizations outside of Russia experienced in land-use monitoring(national parks, other protected natural areas, municipalities, departments of regional planning, local forest subdivisions and hunting farms) who are interested in the responsible management of critical habitat areas.

The “Open Landscape” program will provide:
• Access to the Transparent World portal with sets of high resolution satellite images for the areas of interest with simplified licensing terms;
• User-friendly software for visualization of satellite imagery for monitoring purposes
• Training on the basic use of data, analysis, and interpretation of satellite images, as well as crowd-mapping.

The materials obtained after the first stage of the “Open Landscape” program will be published on the www.openlandscape.info portal. Lessons learned will be used to develop better processes for the distribution and analysis of remote sensing data by the public and non-profit organizations for the purpose of environmental monitoring, also within the framework of the “Space Patrol” public space monitoring system operation.

In June 2013, ScanEx RDC and DigitalGlobe signed an agreement under which the Russian and foreign participants of the “Open Landscape” program will be able to view highly detailed archived images acquired from the WorldView-2 satellite. Detailed plans of the first stage of the “Open Landscape” partnership program were presented and discussed with potential users during the 6th International Conference “Earth from Space – the Most Effective Solutions”.

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The Coastal Water Attribute Monitoring using Satellite data (C-wams) project – funded by ESA under the Value Added Element (VAE) of the EO Envelope Programme – aims at implementing a suite of EO products and data services specifically targeting two growing sectors: Waste Water Treatment plants and Desalination plants.

The coast of the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf and Oman Sea hosts some of the largest desalination plants in the world (in 2011 it was the second producer of desalinates sea water, after Saudi Arabia) and their operation is linked in two ways to the status of the water quality near the coast: from one side the water they release could have an impact on the coastal ecosystem and from the other side they can be strongly affected by harmful and not-harmful algae bloom.

In particular, the local phenomenon known as Red Tide in the last 4 years had a relevant impact to desalination plants operation, causing severe damages and stopping the operations for many weeks.

The main objectives of the C-wams projects are:
a) To start from existing assets, define and setup – together with the user(s) – realistic and feasible service and products for supporting their activities in waste waters and desalination plants;
b) To implement and demonstrate those products and services over two test areas chosen together with the user(s);
c) To assess the service performance and the service utility, getting the user(s) feedback for identify issues/solutions and improvements;
d) To elaborate a plan for a wide service uptake within the framework of the international (e.g. European Marine Directive) obligations.

To fulfil its scope the C-wams project, building on existing prototype EO products, aims in implementing and demonstrating a monitoring service able to derive Near Real Time (NRT) WQ parameter and HAB detection from medium resolution sensors like MERIS and MODIS and to detect.

The consortium developing the C-wams project is composed of TechWorks (Prime, IRL) and Planetek Hellas (GR), which leads the study case about Desalination Plants in the UAE.

The study case in UAE is aimed at identifying HAB (in particular Red Tide) events by detecting anomalous values in some water parameters using MERIS data, with the further support of higher resolution images (i.e. RapidEye and Pléiades) to empirically retrieve Chlorophyll concentration (Chl) and Total Suspended Matter (TSM). Moreover, when a HAB alarm is issued, the use of a very high-resolution sensor (like DubaiSat-1 or Pléiades) is considered to be used for a precise determination of the HAB extent, giving a concrete support in preventing and forecasting its effects.

The service trial involves the EAD (Governmental agency committed to protect and manage biodiversity, to provide a clean environment and to promote sustainable development in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi) as user and its objective is to demonstrate the capability of EO derived products to support users’ current practices concerning environmental protection by efficaciously monitoring WQ parameters (in particular) with the aim of detecting, in near real time, the occurrence of HABs events, like the Red Tide.


Figure 1. Large Red Tide in the Oman sea and Persian Gulf

From a first analysis of the use of the RI for HAB/Red Tide detection, the following conclusions can be derived:

  • the use of RI, combined with a set of thresholds, appears to be a useful parameter to detect HAB/Red Tides
  • RI proved to be a robust tool, in respect to Chl alone
  • preliminary results show that integrating FLH and/or MCI can improve the detection

From these outcomes, an outline of the next steps to be performed has been made:

  • to investigate the use of other parameters like FLH, MCI, SST and TSM to detect false HAB alarms
  • to perform and evaluate the integration of daily MODIS data
  • use of in situ data to be received by the user

Furthermore, high-resolution products would be implemented and applied to the HAB detection.

Further information:

The DMCii team were in the Republic of Namibia’s capital Windhoek this week as sponsors for the UN Conference to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) on the 23rd and 24th September.

Paul Stephens, DMCii’s Director of sales and marketing, gave a keynote speech in which he highlighted the benefits of long term Earth monitoring with satellite images.

DMCii’s daily satellite imagery services are used in the rapid detection of the location and extent of changes in land cover, including degradation and desertification. Furthermore, it provides information about vegetation status and health, which can be used to improve agricultural productivity and provide greater food security.

Paul said: “It was a privilege to be invited to participate in the UNCCD Business Forum, and to discuss how DMCii’s satellite imagery can assist in sustainable management of land resources, to ensure food security for the world

A declaration was made by the UN secretariat during the event, which encouraged the involvement of industry in the prevention of desertification if we are to achieve the goal of a degradation neutral world.

DMCii hopes that the conference will encourage governments worldwide to realise the benefits that long-term satellite imaging and monitoring could have on the desertification of places across the world.

Paul and Elena Lobo, a sales and marketing executive at DMCii, had the honour of meeting with around 30 Ministers and senior environmental officers from across the globe over the two-day event.

Opening the Conference, COP11 President and Minister of Environment and Tourism, Uahekwa Herunga, welcomed delegates to the “the land of the Brave, especially at a time when Namibia is experiencing its worst drought in over 30 years.”

Namibia is home to an area of arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, known as the drylands, where some of the most vulnerable ecosystems and peoples can be found.

The DMCii team had a fantastic time as sponsors of UNCCD, and we look forward to working to help combat global desertification and land degradation.

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