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The South African National Space Agency (SANSA), the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB), the State Space Corporation “Roscosmos” (ROSCOSMOS), the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and the China National Space Administration (CNSA) have today formally joined forces to create the BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation.

A Joint Committee Meeting was held in Haikou, China, on 3 July 2017 to review and deliberate on the progress of the BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation and to discuss a Draft Agreement to be signed later this year. It was stressed that the BRICS Satellite Constellation is the first substantive project in the field of space cooperation.

There are two Phases proposed for the BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation, namely, Phase 1 comprising of a virtual constellation of existing satellites, and Phase 2 to comprise of a new satellite constellation to be discussed and defined in the near future.

The intention of the virtual constellation is to establish the remote sensing data sharing mechanism and avail to the partners, space solutions that meet the challenges faced by humanity, such as global climate change, major natural and technological disasters and environmental protection.

“We remain committed to ensuring the integration of African space-based knowledge and technology in improving the lives of fellow Africans and welcome such esteemed partners in achieving this important objective.’ said Dr Valanathan Munsami, SANSA CEO at the meeting.

There is a consensus that the BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Virtual Constellation is a practical step towards high-tech cooperation between these countries that will assist in attaining the sustainable development goals and challenges pertaining to our respective economies and societies. This will also inject new vitality into the strategic partnership among BRICS States.

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Deimos Imaging’s matrix, UrtheCast Corp. (TSX:UR) (“UrtheCast” or the “Company”), and Land O’ Lakes, Inc., one of the United States’ premier agribusiness and food companies, announced a long-term agreement for GEOSYS, a Land O’Lakes subsidiary, to purchase geospatial data from the UrtheDaily Constellation, UrtheCast’s planned constellation of Earth observation satellites which will deliver daily, medium resolution imagery of the entire planet’s landmass.

By entering this agreement, GEOSYS will become an anchor customer for the UrtheDaily Constellation . GEOSYS, already the UrtheCast group’s largest agricultural customer and one of the world’s leading providers of digital agriculture solutions, will use the data to improve the decision-making processes for their customers globally, including WinField United, the Land O’Lakes crop input business.

GEOSYS has 30 years of experience in the industry and views this flow of data as a highly innovative technical and commercial game changer for in-season field monitoring,” says Damien Lepoutre, GEOSYS founder and president. “The UrtheDaily Constellation is being built on a heritage of proven technology and is the only solution we’ve seen clearly designed to meet our demanding data requirements. This will dramatically increase the value of decision support tools made available to farmers through our customers. As a result, we are committed to helping UrtheCast bring UrtheDaily to market.”


Deimos-1 image, Crops in Montana

The UrtheCast group has worked collaboratively with GEOSYS in recent years – along with customers operating in such diverse sectors as water management, insurance, municipal planning, finance and defense and intelligence – to conceptualize and design the UrtheDaily Constellation. The Constellation, expected to be comprised of eight Earth observation satellites, is designed to capture medium-resolution imagery of the Earth’s entire landmass (excluding Antarctica) every day, producing machine learning-ready, scientific-grade data to help geoanalytics companies measure and monitor change on our planet, and ultimately help to address some of Earth’s biggest challenges, at scale. Providing the UrtheDaily dataset to GEOSYS will enable their customers to make more profitable and agronomically sound decisions.

“We are honored to announce GEOSYS as the UrtheDaily anchor customer for agriculture,” stated Wade Larson, UrtheCast’s President and CEO. “The selection of UrtheDaily by GEOSYS, a pioneer in digital agriculture, validates our belief that UrtheDaily is the remote-sensing constellation of choice for the sophisticated geoanalytics market. We at UrtheCast are extremely pleased to partner with an organization that shares many of our core values and ambitions as we look to jointly harness the capabilities of UrtheDaily to tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues.”

Under the terms of the agreement, payments will be made as soon as UrtheCast begins delivering UrtheDaily Constellation data to GEOSYS, subject to UrtheCast arranging its financing for the build and launch of the UrtheDaily Constellation, and other customary covenants for agreements of this nature.


Deimos-2 image, Crops in Oman

About GEOSYS
GEOSYS is the first global digital agriculture company founded by agronomists. With 30 years of industry experience, GEOSYS provides clients with data, analysis and insights needed to make more informed decisions. Services range from worldwide risk management and monitoring agricultural commodities to input sales and precision farming support by using the latest research in agronomics, information technologies and remote sensing. GEOSYS also develops highly customized business solutions for large, multinational agricultural companies. Acquired by Land O’Lakes, Inc. in 2013 as an independent business, GEOSYS is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota with offices in France, Switzerland, Australia, and Brazil. For more information, visit www.geosys.com.

About UrtheCast Corp.
UrtheCast Corp. is a Vancouver-based technology company that serves the rapidly evolving geospatial and geoanalytics markets with a wide range of information-rich products and services. The Company currently operates four Earth Observation sensors in space, including two cameras aboard the International Space Station and two satellites, Deimos-1 and Deimos-2. Imagery and video data captured by these sensors is downlinked to ground stations across the planet and displayed on the UrthePlatform, or distributed directly to partners and customers. UrtheCast is also developing and anticipates launching the world’s first fully-integrated constellation of multispectral optical and SAR satellites, called OptiSAR™, in addition to its proposed UrtheDaily™ Constellation, which the Company believes will together revolutionize monitoring of our planet with high-quality, medium and high-resolution, and high-coverage and high-revisit imagery in all weather conditions, any time of day. Common shares of UrtheCast trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange as ticker ‘UR’.
For more information, visit UrtheCast’s website at www.urthecast.com.

Forward Looking Information
This release contains certain information which, as presented, constitutes “forward-looking information” within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information involves statements that relate to future events and often addresses expected future business and financial performance, containing words such as “anticipate”, “believe”, “plan”, and “expect”, statements that an action or event “may” or “will” be taken or occur, or other similar expressions and includes, but is not limited to: UrtheCast’s future growth and constellation operations plans; plans regarding the financing, build, launch and operation of the planned UrtheDaily Constellation, and the delivery of imagery produced by the UrtheDaily Constellation to GEOSYS; and UrtheCast’s expectations regarding GEOSYS complying with its payment obligations and other terms of the agreement with UrtheCast. Such statements reflect UrtheCast’s current views with respect to future events and are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by UrtheCast, are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and contingencies. Many factors could cause UrtheCast’s actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including, among others: any delays or failures in the design, development, construction, launch and operational commissioning of the proposed OptiSAR or UrtheDaily constellations; the Company being unable to deliver imagery products meeting the minimum specifications required by the agreement with GEOSYS described above; the Company being unable to finance the build, launch and commissioning of the UrtheDaily Constellation; the Company being unable to convert the Memoranda of Understanding in respect of funding of the OptiSAR constellation into binding, definitive agreements; interruptions to or failures of UrtheCast’s infrastructure; legal and regulatory changes, as well as those factors and assumptions discussed in UrtheCast’s annual information form dated March 28, 2017, (the “AIF”), which is available under UrtheCast’s SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. Forward-looking information is developed based on assumptions about such risks, uncertainties and other factors set out herein, in the AIF, and as disclosed from time to time on UrtheCast’s SEDAR profile. UrtheCast undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by Canadian securities laws. Readers are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements.

The Lloyd’s Market Association (LMA) said on July 6 that it has received backing and funding support for a satellite imagery and intelligence service for all Lloyd’s managing agents.

The new service aims to enable improvements to claims processes and exposure management both pre and post a natural catastrophe across multiple classes of business. It will help Lloyd’s carriers to assess the extent of the damage/loss at an early stage by providing ‘ground truth’ intelligence such as satellite imagery and any available all-source data, according to the statement.

The data and analytics will allow Lloyd’s claims professionals to manage and adjust claims remotely, in some instances making early part-payment or full settlement to policy holders. The service will be delivered to each managing agent via MIS’s custom-built portal, the LMA said.

“Data and analytics are driving rapid change in our industry and I am pleased that we are supporting such an important and growing field,” said Ruth Cameron-Errington, senior claims executive at the LMA. “This service and the technology it brings will undoubtedly further improve the way in which claims professionals and the wider market manage and respond to claims post a significant natural catastrophe.”

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29 June 2017. An interdisciplinary team of scientists from the University of Leicester and other institutions has played a pivotal role in research investigating a possible link between air pollution and the rise in type 2 diabetes.

New research, published in the journal Environment International, examined data from 10,443 participants from diabetes screening studies in Leicestershire, UK.

The exposure to air pollution, the number of cases of type 2 diabetes and the impact of demographic and lifestyle factors were all considered. The authors concluded that demographic factors largely explained the association between air pollution and type 2 diabetes.

The research team, supported by the NIHR, is comprised of University of Leicester experts from a wide variety of fields, including Earth Observation Science, the University’s Diabetes Research Centre and the Department of Health Sciences and builds upon world-leading research in these areas.

Dr Gary O’Donovan, who led the research and is formerly of the University of Leicester and now at Loughborough University, said: “High air pollution and low physical activity are two of the leading causes of disease and premature death in middle and high-income countries.

“Like most cities in the UK, Leicester has only a handful of air quality monitors. The UN has estimated that two-thirds of world’s population will be living in cities by 2050 and our cities must become better, healthier places in which to live. Cities like Copenhagen in Denmark and Medellín in Colombia are doing a much better job of measuring air pollution and facilitating active transport than most cities in the UK.”

Exposure to traffic-related air pollutants is known to cause insulin resistance, a hallmark of the disease, and observational evidence has been applied to better understand a potential link.

Professor Roland Leigh, Technical Director of EarthSense and Director of Enterprise at the University of Leicester’s Institute for Space and Earth Observation, and co-author of the study, said: “We know that air pollution is the world’s largest environmental health risk affecting 92% of the population and associated with more than three million deaths per year, and evidence suggested it may contribute to the rise in type 2 diabetes.

“While original results suggested association between air pollution and associated particulates and type 2 diabetes, when the effects of lifestyle and demographic factors were considered, and given the limited size of the sample, evidence for direct association with air pollution was inconclusive.

“We will, however, continue to apply cutting-edge air quality research to unpick potentially connected long-term exposure factors,” continued Professor Leigh. “As innovators in air quality monitoring, the University of Leicester and EarthSense has a fundamental contribution to make in the understanding of the complex issues of pollution exposure and health.”

Diabetes is one of the leading causes of death in lower middle, upper middle and high income economies. The global prevalence of diabetes has nearly doubled, from 4.7% in 1980 to 8.5% in 2014, with the majority of cases being type 2. Experimental evidence exists to suggest exposure to nitrogen dioxide and associated particulate matter is related to inflammation and insulin resistance.

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25 June 2017. Satellogic™ , a provider of affordable, high-resolution Earth Observation (EO), has just announced the company has closed a substantial $27 million Series B funding round.

The closing of the series B round happened during the same week as the launch into orbit of the company’s sixth smallsat (the third in its high-resolution imaging constellation) on June 15 from Jiuquan, China. Investors in this round include the Chinese company Tencent® as the lead, backed up by São Paulo-based Pitanga™, CrunchFund™ and other investors.

Satellogic has created a uniquely low-cost smallsat platform with unparalleled capabilities, enabling for the first time affordable monitoring of the planet at one meter of resolution and high-frequency, hyper-spectral data solutions ideally suited for advanced geo-intelligence and other applications. The one meter resolution payload in Satellogic’s satellites captures state-of-the-art high quality, high-resolution data at a small fraction of the cost of competing systems, enabling for the first time the affordable monitoring of human activity on the planet.

The hyper spectral camera is unique among its competitors’ satellites in orbit, and is capable of 30 meter spatial resolution from orbit and has the ability to discern narrow spectral bands positioned with nanometric precision along the visible and near-infrared spectrum. Hyper-spectral imaging allows the advanced identification of both materials and molecular processes, and is particularly well-suited for agriculture, environmental and climate-change monitoring. Other applications of hyperspectral data include land use classification intelligence for industry and government planning as well as forecasting, mineralogical discovery and forestry management.

With the March 2017 de-commissioning of NASA’s Hyperion bird, Satellogic is now the sole supplier of high-resolution, hyper-spectral imagery in the world.

Emiliano Kargieman, the CEO and founder of Satellogic, noted that the combination of Satellogic’s capabilities for low-cost data capture in high-resolution and the hyperspectral domain are a powerful enabler for the firm’s own data science teams, in addition for those of company partners, and ultimately allow more value to be provided to end customers. He emphasized that the company is focused on unlocking the value of live geo-information analytics to improve daily decision-making for every branch of government and for every corporation, small company or person on the planet.

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22 June 2017. A team of scientists led by the Universities of Leicester and East Anglia are leading research to protect wildlife by using satellite data to identify monkey populations that have declined through hunting.

In a new article in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, a working group chaired by Professor Heiko Balzter, from the National Centre for Earth Observation at the University of Leicester, has looked at ways in which an array of technologies could be used to identify how many species are alive in an area and the risks they may be exposed to.

Using a combination of satellite and ground data, the team can map multiple indicators of monkey distribution, including human activity zones as inferred from roads and settlements, direct detections from mosquito-derived iDNA, animal sound recordings, plus detections of other species that are usually found when monkeys are present, such as other large vertebrates.

This data could be used to identify areas in which monkey populations are particularly vulnerable.
Professor Balzter explained: “There are ten times as many satellites in operation now as there were in the 1970s. Most people now use maps from Earth Observation on their mobile, such as Google Earth. The European Copernicus satellites now provide free global data every 5 days at 10m resolution. And think of small cube satellites that fit into a tote bag and weigh only 2kg. Satellite technology has undergone a massive change and has never been so accessible.

“However, satellites cannot observe small animals directly. Most biodiversity is invisible to a satellite.
“Scientists have developed indicators for biodiversity, such as land cover type, and modern ecological models that can digest satellite data and information on species occurrence are now offering near-real time monitoring of the land management impacts on biodiversity. We propose using a mix of new technology rather than a single remedy.”

Among the technologies which can be used to map monkey distribution are automated recording devices that can automatically record animal sounds in a landscape. Modern genetic fingerprinting on a massive scale, called ‘high-throughput DNA sequencing’, can also tell which species live in a landscape based on the environmental DNA that they leave behind in the form of saliva, urine, faeces or blood.

Mass-collected bulk samples of organisms can be collected in the field with relative ease.
For example, mosquitoes can be caught in a trap and blended into a ‘biodiversity soup’ to analyse the DNA in the blood of the animals they have been feeding on.

Professor Douglas W. Yu from the School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia, who co-led the research, said: “DNA-based methods are a powerful way to relieve the taxonomic bottleneck in biodiversity assessment, but they are only partially able to relieve the sampling bottleneck. In the end, the only way to cover whole landscapes is to combine satellites, sequencers, and statistics.”
Together, the data on the animal sounds and photos, the DNA they leave behind, and satellite observations provide a wealth of biodiversity information.

Professor Balzter added: “It may sound like a strange idea – satellites that can see the genetic make-up of the blood sucked by mosquitoes. Of course they cannot directly see that. But big data from genetic fingerprinting of animal DNA in a landscape combined with fine-resolution satellite data and sophisticated ecological models can. We need to work across subjects to make this happen. These are very exciting times. If our research can help to save a species that gives me a very strong sense of purpose to my job as a university professor.”
Many animal species are threatened with extinction. As a result of this, the UK has signed up to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity to try and stop this loss of species.

In 2010, the Convention met in Aichi, Japan, and agreed a set of targets, called the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. These targets aim to address the underlying causes of biodiversity, reduce the pressures on biodiversity, safeguard ecosystems and species, enhance the benefits from biodiversity and ecosystem services, and enable participatory planning, knowledge management and capacity building.

The paper is led by Alex Bush of the Kunming Institute of Zoology and Canadian Rivers Institute.
Alex said: “For years ecologists have struggled to test or extend models of ecosystem-level change because the data were too expensive to collect at the required scales. Instead decisions have typically relied on surrogates with unknown consequences. With the parallel developments in remote sensing, genomics and more automated field recording, we now have the tools needed to collect data at large scales. Methods to model these ‘big data’ sources are already available and could improve how we conserve and manage ecosystems, and the essential services they provide, in a period of intense global change.”

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June 27, 2017. Remote sensing technologies, using satellite and aerial data, could revolutionise the management of the oil palm industry, bringing both business and environmental benefits, say environmental experts writing in the journal Geo-spatial Information Science.

Yet much greater collaboration between industry and academia is needed to achieve the true potential of these technologies. To date, palm oil plantations have generally been monitored using costly and time-consuming land-based assessments, and many countries lack the resources to do regular surveys. Remote sensing, on the other hand, can provide quick, repetitive, accurate information on huge areas of oil palms using high-resolution satellite imagery. It also provides the necessary independent monitoring needed for certification agencies, such as performed by RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) and ISCC (International Sustainability and Carbon Certification).

Mainly grown in Southeast Asia and Africa, oil palms are a highly productive, producing more vegetable oil per hectare than any other oil crop. However, the conversion of tropical forests to palm oil plantations has devastated the environment—resulting in the loss of a huge number of plant and animal species. Amid rising demand for cheaper vegetable oil and biofuel, the challenge is to increase the production of oil palm while reducing the impact on the world’s forests and the environment.

Geoinformation technologies could lead to huge improvements in the sustainable management of palm oil plantations—helping to solve some of the environmental problems by, for example, detecting illegal deforestation and enabling early diagnosis of disease and pest problems, as well as improving productivity by assessing crop and soil conditions more effectively.

However, some of the remote sensing data exploration methods are still at the research and development stage, and progress is slow, explains Dr Kasturi Devi Kanniah from the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia in Malaysia and her colleagues. Although the potential opportunities are already being explored by plantation companies, the techniques are often kept confidential. The authors call for industry and academia to join forces to speed up the development and implementation of these technologies, and increase the responsible management of the whole sector. Various opportunities exist, such as:

  • Using remote sensing imagery to identify lands suitable for oil palm expansion—protecting high carbon stock forests (which if cleared release high amount of greenhouse gases), and land with high conservation value.
  • Developing remote sensing technologies to improve the accuracy of yield prediction and performance—by measuring observable biophysical parameters like the greenness of the palm canopy, height of the tree, and soil conditions.
  • Expanding the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to provide regular and timely monitoring of oil palm plantations in tropical countries where clouds often restrict the use of satellite images.

With the open data policy of the European Copernicus programme monitoring at a proper scale and suitable repeat cycle becomes feasible. The availability of multisensor optical and active microwave imagery at high spatial resolution fosters the use of geoinformation at plantation and tree level. “The article describes the state-of-the-art in remote sensing for palm oil and provides an overview on the potential to improve a sustainable oil palm plantation management, including urgent research questions.” says Dr. Christine Pohl from University of Osnabrueck. Her research team together with a network of other experts from the University of Twente in the Netherlands and ISCC in Cologne are investigating the support of sustainability assessment using geoinformation.

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June 25, 2017. GROW is the UK’s only agri-tech business plan competition, established by Agri-Tech East to stimulate entrepreneurship in the industry.

From left to right: Dallan Byrne (SoilSense), David Godding (Farming Data), Belinda Clarke (Agri-Tech East) and Howard Partridge (Innovate UK)

Lifting sub-Saharan farmers out of poverty by creating a market for their surplus and a water sensor that can create moisture maps from the air, were the two winning business plans at GROW – the UK’s agri-tech business plan competition. GROW was developed by Agri-Tech East to stimulate and support entrepreneurship in agriculture and horticulture.

Dr Belinda Clarke, Director of Agri-Tech East, said that the entries this year were looking at global challenges: “Smart water use, enhancing data available for decision support and improving profitability by finding markets for edible waste were strong themes among the entries this year. Many were looking for partners and investors for pilot studies and this is where the agri-tech cluster in the east of England is particularly strong. Our membership includes investors, researchers and innovative farmers and for strong propositions there is a receptive environment.”

The keynote speaker was Robert Alston, Managing Director of Silfield Ltd and Board Director at Anglia Farmers. Alston is also chairman of AF Finance Limited, an agricultural pooled collective investment scheme.

Alston comments that for technology to be adopted by farmers it needs to be significantly better than what they have already, to offer the opportunity for them to differentiate their products, or to guarantee quality standards so they meet contractual requirements.

“You have to be able to adapt quickly in this market,” he says. “You have to get something out there and prove it. It must be a problem that is there for farmers now – not one that is only becoming a problem, which we might see further down the line.”

The GROW Judges’ Award went to Farming Data, a mobile trading platform that uses mobile money and SMS texting on a basic phone to allow smallholders and buyers to communicate and trade more effectively. “Local is the new global” comments co-founder David Godding.

For the first time the audience had an opportunity to tip their own winner with money from the ‘Bank of Agri-Tech East’. The audience choice was SoilSense , an aerial soil sensor that can provide a detailed map of moisture content of the soil – even through vegetation – for a whole farm, in minutes. The proprietary technology was first developed for detecting breast cancer tumours.

Smallholders grow 50 per cent of the world’s food and 40 per cent of global food production relies on irrigation – so the two organisations are providing solutions for a large unmet need.

Howard Partridge from Innovate UK , sponsor of the 2016/17 challenge, said: “There was a strong line-up of finalists who presented very innovative business concepts, we will look forward to following their progress.”

Dr Belinda Clarke, director of Agri-Tech East, thanked the participants and the judges.

“Thank you also to Innovate UK for its support, to the organisations that have provided support prizes and to Agrii who hosted the event at its Throws Farm Technology Centre.”

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June 6, 2017. SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Harris Corp. and Canada’s exactEarth are establishing a space-based constellation of more than 60 maritime-tracking sensors to enable government and commercial customers to pinpoint the location of ships around the world nearly instantaneously.

Harris announced on June 5 at the GEOINT Symposium that the first four sensors, launched in January as hosted payloads on Iridium Next communications satellites, are tracking 250,000 ships through their Automatic Identification System (AIS) beacons. By the end of 2018, when Iridium Communications is scheduled to finish launching its Iridium Next constellation, Harris and exactEarth will be able to notify customers of a ship’s location with an average latency of less than one minute.

That means it will usually take less than one minute from the time a satellite detects an AIS message for the data to pass through the Iridium constellation and ground stations to the customer, David Mottarella, Harris senior manager for maritime geospatial solutions, told reporters June 5.

AIS signals were designed for ship-to-ship communications and the cannot always be detected by satellites. To prevent gaps in coverage, 82 percent of the world will be within view of two AIS sensors and 48 percent will be within view of three. “The more chances I have to collect the data, the better our detection probabilities are going to be,” Mottarella said. “With 60-plus satellites on orbit, that detection capability is going to be unmatched.”

Harris owns and operates the AIS payloads on Iridium Next satellites and provides AIS products and services to U.S. government customers. exactEArth handles ground-based processing of AIS data and sells AIS products and services to other global customers.

Prior to the January launch of hosted payloads on Iridium Next, exactEarth was tracking ships with AIS sensors on eight small satellites in low Earth orbit.

When the exactEarthRT, which stands for real time, constellation is completed, Harris and exactEarth will be able to notify customers of specific events, such as ship-to-ship rendezvous, ships changing direction, turning off AIS beacons or loitering in prohibited areas. With the new space-based constellation, Harris and exactEarth also will be able to validate a ship’s position even if the vessel is attempting to spoof its geolocation, Mottarella said.

This article was written by Written by Debra Werner in SpaceNews. Source

Harwell, Oxfordshire, 29th June, 2017. Rezatec, in conjunction with the University of Reading, is delivering its PASQUAL (“Monitoring and prediction of PASture QUALity and productivity from satellites”) project to develop an Earth Observation satellite based pasture farming intelligence tool.

Through the analysis of multiple remote sensing satellite data sources (visible and radar) and meteorological data, in combination with the University of Reading’s detailed modelling and data-assimilation techniques, the tool will enable dairy farmers to monitor and predict pasture productivity and quality.

Trials are currently being conducted by the University of Reading over a two-year period, initially at controlled research plots, and are now being extended to operational dairy farms. This approach is driving iterative development of models and data products, which will be delivered to users through Rezatec’s geospatial web-portal platform. The platform will be upgraded and extended to support the required data streams and implement the bespoke grass growth models to create an innovative decision support tool for dairy farmers.

Alternative technologies and R&D strategies in this area are scarce, but those that are emerging generally focus on empirical vegetation indices, which can lead to unreliable and inaccurate estimates of PPQ; our proposed approach aims to offer a much more reliable product. Furthermore, most competitors using vegetation indices are focusing on crops, rather than grasslands, despite the fact that dairy production world-wide is 700 million tonnes.

“The proposed work and selected approach will ensure an accelerated route to market of the research currently being conducted by those at the forefront of remote sensing and pasture research, including colleagues at the University’s Centre for Dairy Research (CEDAR), in strong collaboration with practitioners in the dairy farm industry,” commented Professor Anne Verhoef, Principal Investigator of PASQUAL, Department of Geography and Environmental Science, the University of Reading.

This project is innovative both commercially and technically on many fronts. It pushes boundaries beyond current leading-edge world science and technology in the area of obtaining near real time estimates of grass crop productivity and quality. The University of Reading will develop a new model for predicting the productivity and quality of grasslands. This model will be informed by a broad range of data for both model development, calibration and verification. In addition to established local data (farm management/field data, weather data), the model will have direct access to multiple remote sensing satellite data sources including radar data which is well suited to monitoring tasks in cloud covered regions, such as the UK.

Dr Andrew Carrel, Chief Technology Officer, Rezatec added, “The outputs from the data modelling process will be combined with other data on Rezatec’s platform, where further processing will take place using machine learning and data mining techniques to add the predictive analysis that will make the tool highly valuable for the farming end users.”

Rezatec’s platform is designed to deliver high performance data visualization, analytics and decision support to multiple end users, and is highly scalable. It will facilitate the broad use of the farming intelligence tools and services within the UK, Europe and across the globe.

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