Skip to content

(21 October 2016) A new service harnesses three decades of satellite observations of coastal zones made available through a cloud-based system to provide a rich information source for fisheries, one of our fastest growing sources of food.

SAFI (Supporting our Aquaculture and Fisheries Industries) is a prototype information service supported by the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme. It uses Earth observation data to support the fishing industry.

Ensuring ease of use, SAFI accesses the powerful capabilities of the ESA-backed Coastal Thematic Exploitation Platform (C-TEP), a cloud-based ‘one-stop shop’ that gathers coastal-zone satellite data, processing algorithms and computing power.

The three-year SAFI project came to a close with a final workshop in Morocco at the end of September. Here, it was announced that SAFI will continue as a commercial undertaking.

“The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation recognises aquaculture as one of the fastest growing food-producing sectors, accounting for 90.4 million tonnes in 2012 – nearly 50% of the world’s food fish,” comments Antoine Mangin of Earth-observing company ACRI, overseeing SAFI.

“There is an established need for simple user-oriented Earth observation tools to help guide the sector’s continued growth, and to set more accurate fishing quotas for coastal waters.

“Fish famers already pay very close attention to seasonal changes, to try and look for similarities between the current year and previous annual patterns. Our service – powered in turn by the C-TEP platform – supports such analysis, enabling the speedy processing of large amounts of data to make historical comparisons, statistical analysis and forecasting.

“Fish farming, for instance, needs to take place at specific temperature ranges for each fish species, among other environmental parameters such as turbidity.

“Using C-TEP, SAFI can work swiftly through tens of terabytes of data at a time to extract the temperature evolution over 20 years. Doing the same with additional variables like water transparency and wave height lets us quickly and easily pinpoint suitable farming location across the globe.
“We can also go on to calculate the environmental carrying capacity of the site, allowing users to forecast likely yields.”

Regularly updated maps of shallow-water seabeds from Sentinel-2 images can also help to site mussel and other shellfish farms.

Along with three decades of archive satellite data, C-TEP gives access to the very latest imagery from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 satellites, covering water colour, sea-surface temperature and height. Fresh data become accessible to SAFI on a near-real time basis for use in forecast models.

“We can give early warning of potential fish-killing phytoplankton blooms: green chlorophyll or red tide. In reaction, oxygen can be diffused into fish pens, although this is costly. Alternatively, fish can be harvested early.

“High waves can also be forecast, so that fish pens can be sunk deeper underwater. And, 30–50% of aquaculture costs come down to feeding. Fish eat less in lower temperatures, or when low-visibility conditions make them unhappy. SAFI allows these conditions to be forecast so operators can avoid wasting food.”

Source

Successful ideas competition INNOspace Masters enters the second round.
The INNOspace Masters ideas competition is officially launched at the cross-industry INNOspace symposium in Augsburg on 6 October. Innovative ideas and solutions can be submitted for the next space generation from 14 November 2016 until 13 February 2017.

The INNOspace Masters is organised by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Space Administration, and embedded in the INNOspace® initiative. Anwendungszentrum GmbH Oberpfaffenhofen, an experienced specialist in the organisation of competitions, conducts the INNOspace Masters on behalf of DLR, with support of first-class Partners.

Source

(November 29, 2016 News by Andrew Zolli) In the hours, days and weeks following a natural disaster, critical questions loom: How extensive is the damage? Where are people and infrastructure most affected? Where should scarce response resources be deployed to save lives, reduce suffering and protect property?


By providing perspective and context, Planet’s satellite imagery can play a vital role in answering these questions, and improving the speed, efficiency and effectiveness of disaster response.

Today, Planet already tracks several disaster events every week around the world, and regularly provides imagery to national governments, NGOs and other humanitarian response organizations. In partnership with both the German government (DLR/ZKI), and the US Geological Survey, we support International Charter for Space and Major Disasters, which distributes imagery to speed disaster response and recovery to responding organizations.

Our imagery has already been used to respond to major earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires around the world. Because our constellation of satellites provides persistent monitoring of the whole planet, we regularly collect imagery of disaster events that happen in places that otherwise receive little coverage. We also often have the most up-to-date imagery of what an area looked like before a disaster occurred.

Starting today, we’re also making some of our imagery available more directly to the public, volunteers, humanitarian organizations, and and other coordinating bodies, at a new webpage, planet.com/disasterdata

On this page, you’ll be able to see the disasters we’re currently responding to, request API access to datasets related to those events, and even sign up to receive automatic email alerts when we’re making new data available.

This is part of our continually evolving efforts to ensure our data gets into the right hands, at the right time, to achieve its greatest humanitarian potential. This journey will continue to evolve in the months to come – watch this space

Source

The geoinformation service Rheticus® Displacement developed by Planetek Italia has been awarded at the 10th edition of Premio Best Practices per l’innovazione (Best Practices for Innovation 2016), held in Salerno, Italy on December 1st – 2nd, 2016.

Telecom Italia, the Italian leader in TLC industry, assigned the award during the annual event organized by Confindustria Salerno.

The initiative was launched in 2006 with the aim of spreading the “culture” of innovation in the public and private sectors, through the presentation of real cases of innovation made by firms in the service and manufacturing sectors.

During the event, a technical panel of experts assigns awards to companies, which have created an innovative project – technological, product, process and social – with demonstrable and measurable results.

This year, about 101 participants presented projects from all over Italy. All the details of the winning projects are published on www.premiobestpractices.it

Rheticus® Displacement is a geoinformation service designed for the monitoring of earth’s surface movements, aimed at monitoring areas subject to landslides and subsidence, and the stability of infrastructures.
Launched in April 2016, Rheticus® Displacement has already garnered awards at Italian and international level, such as the “Application of the Year 2016” of OpenGeoData Italia and listed among finalists of the “European EO product of the Year” of EARSC Association.
Rheticus® Displacement is one of the services provided through the www.rheticus.eu Cloud platform. Shifting from data provision to geospatial knowledge and geo-analytics, its services are delivered worldwide through a growing network of resellers.

Vincenzo Barbieri, CMO of Planetek Italia, said, “This new award makes us proud and confident that we are on track for a marketable and sustainable innovation. Rheticus® represents a real change of the business model in geoinformation services. Its unique features, which makes geoinformation and analytics available continuously, on the Cloud and low cost, is a fundamental support for several application fields, such as infrastructures engineering, territorial planning or coastal marine waters monitoring and reporting”. “The Rheticus® platform is now the synthesis of Planetek skills and expertise in developing and providing value-added services, of great benefit to those who, in the public and private sectors, is working to preserve our Earth and improve the quality of our lives”.

Source

(14 November 2016) Following the recent launch of the new Sentinel Data Access Service, Sentinel-2 data is now available through the online data hub, providing users with invaluable new data.

SEDAS, which is jointly funded by the UK Space Agency and the Satellite Applications Catapult, was launched earlier this year as a new online data hub to enable UK end-users to access Copernicus Earth observation data.

Sentinel-2 provides wide-area, high-resolution, multispectral imagery which will benefit efforts to tackle deforestation, food security, disaster monitoring and coastal pollution. The satellite provides global coverage of the Earth’s land surface every ten days, making the data of great value in ongoing studies.

Stuart Martin, CEO of the Satellite Applications Catapult, said: “The addition of the Sentinel-2 data to SEDAS is a significant milestone in the platform’s capabilities and benefit to users. With its high resolution imagery and high revisit frequency, Sentinel-2 could provide great value to the agricultural sector, emergency services, and organisations monitoring inland waterways and coastal areas, amongst others.”

Katherine Courtney, CEO of the UK Space Agency, said: “With this new capability the SEDAS portal will further support UK users to produce world leading innovative products, services and applications from Sentinel-2 data. We are funding easy, cost-free access to satellite data for the benefit of everyone, but particularly to help businesses design new solutions to support the wider UK economy.”

To-date, more than 70 organisations have used the SEDAS portal and we anticipate this growing significantly following the availability of Sentinel-2 data.

Explore the platform by visiting: sedas.satapps.org
Source

Let’s be honest, scientific research projects can sometimes be difficult to understand and explain to those around you.

For this reason, the ECOPOTENTIAL Communication Team is proud and excited to launch a new video explaining the project with a simple but effective animation This handcrafted video tells a story involving Peter, a protected area manager, and … Continue reading “What’s Ecopotential about? Discover it fast and easy with our video!”

Continue reading ECOPOTENTIAL Scientific Publications and Presentations

We cordially invite you to participate in the Regional Workshop of the GEO-CRADLE Horizon2020 project (www.geocradle.eu – Coordinating and integRating state-of-the-art Earth Observation Activities in the regions of North Africa, Middle East, and Balkans and Developing Links with GEO related initiatives towards GEOSS), with guest speakers Dr Haris Kontoes (Project Coordinator), and Dr Hesham El Askary (Chapman University, USA). The event is jointly organized by the Project Coordinator National Observatory of Athens and the Geography and Urban Planning Department at UAEU.


It will take place on:
February 2nd 2017, from 10:00 to 13:00
UAE University Reem Island Facility
Sky Tower, 8th Floor, Reem Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE

This regional workshop will focus on identifying the potential local challenges hindering the Earth Observation (EO) market uptake and business performances, while seeking solutions to enhance growth and innovation in the geo-information sector. Aiming to support knowledge sharing and an enhanced cooperation between academia and industry, the event will also provide participants with a unique cross-sector networking opportunity. In addition, panel discussions will be complemented with information on available EU funding in the EO sector. We are looking forward to welcoming you to this event and we are certain that your presence and input will greatly enrich our discussions.

Please register by filling in this form

For further information about project activities, please visit the “GEO-CRADLE website“http://www.geocradle.eu

The Space Placements in INdustry scheme (SPIN) has been designed to provide an introductory link for those considering employment in the space sector and space sector organisations looking to find the most talented and enthusiastic people to ensure the future success of their businesses.

The scheme is managed by the Institute for Environmental Analytics at the University of Reading and supported by the Satellite Applications Catapult and the UK Space Agency.

The value of practical experience in the workplace has long been recognised to offer benefits to the spintern, providing valuable experience of the work environment and the skills that are crucial to a successful career, and benefits to the sponsor or host organisation who can identify a project that might otherwise not be achievable, carried out with a fresh pair of eyes and perhaps a fresh perspective on their own organisation and possibly provide an informal extended interview of a potential employee.

The scheme has been running since 2013 and continues to grow in popularity. We always encourage enquiries from potential host organisations who have a short-term project (typically of eight weeks duration), and who would like to offer individuals the opportunity to gain new skills and an insight into their business.

We welcome applications from individuals from all disciplines who are enthusiastic to work in the Space sector and are keen to develop new skills, applying and building on the knowledge they’ve acquired in their studies to date.

SPIN FAQs

Many space startups are vying to take the place of the world’s governments as the pre-eminent operators of imaging satellites, but this one has a unique scheme to take advantage of orbital radar.

apella Space, which will launch its first satellite this year, aims to take advantage of a gap in current commercial satellite coverage. Most imaging satellites rely on daylight and the absence of clouds for the clearest imagery. At night or when the weather isn’t cooperating, there’s not too much to see. That big image above of the Juan Fernandez islands is beautiful, but it would be difficult to count how many boats, for example, are in the vicinity.

And many of the customers for satellite imagery want to be able to count those boats, or shipping containers in a foggy port, or trees underneath a mountain cloudbreak. The solution for that problem is a technology called synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which can be mounted on a satellite and used to create a 3D image of the landscape below.

Here’s one such image, taken by TerraSAR, a satellite jointly operated by the German space agency and Airbus: According to Payam Banazadeh, the founder and CEO of Capella, imagery like this will solve a key problem for consumers of satellite data, which is a lack of consistent coverage that isn’t disrupted by night or clouds. But SAR satellites are largely operated by government space and weather agencies.


The Panama Canal, seen by synthetic aperture radar. (TerraSAR)

Banazadeh was among the first generations of students to work on cubesats—tiny, low-cost satellites often built with off-the-shelf parts. After graduation he worked on several microsatellite projects at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Seeing the commercial potential in the technology, he sought an MBA at Stanford University. There, he met William Woods, who was finishing a PhD in remote sensing and working on the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Together, the two founded Capella to commercialize space SAR technology.

SAR satellites require larger antennae and more energy expenditure than their optical brethren because they rely on “active” imaging—rather than measuring the light reflecting from an object, Capella’s satellite will send a signal down to Earth and measure how it bounces back. The “secret sauce” at the company, Banazadeh said, is in how the antennae are cleverly folded and packaged in the satellite body, and how they manage their power supply.

Since starting the company at the beginning of 2016, Capella’s founders were able to develop their technology and demonstrate it during airplane and helicopter flights. This quick development cycle allowed them to raise several million dollars from venture capitalists, including Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Data Collective Venture Capital, and Canaan Partners. The latter two funds have experience in the sector, with investments, respectively, in Planet, a leading satellite imaging startup, and SkyBox, a satellite imaging firm that was acquired by Google for $500 million in 2014 and is now known as Terra Bella.

Canaan general partner Deepak Kamra says a SAR satellite company is a natural next investment for his fund to “recreate our success with Skybox.” There were no fully commercial alternatives in the market, and the existing technology tended to be in the heavy and expensive satellite design paradigm (TerraSAR weighs more than a ton) rather than the light and cheap approach favored by space startups like this one.

“We think Capella has solved those problems with a cubesat, which a lot of people are surprised to hear, [but] they have some pretty unique concepts and intellectual property,” Kamra says.

To meet the expected demand for imagery, Capella expects to fly 30 satellites in total. The next step for the company, like many Silicon Valley firms with space aspirations, will be to take the data its flying sensors obtain and use machine learning and sophisticated algorithms to provide direct answers to clients. “We don’t believe our customers want to see pixels,” Banazadeh says.

For example, he says, Capella’s satellites will be able to measure changes in the ground down to the millimeter level. Oil companies already use thousands of tilt-meters placed on the ground near drilling operations to track changes that could help them improve their extraction strategies. Banazadeh says his firm will be able to deliver those measurements, from space, far more cheaply.

Quartz Media
and satnews

(December 2016) Conclusions from “Satellite Applications for the Alps” event held in Berchtesgaden, Germany on 27 Oct. 2016.

Potential and confirmed users of satellite applications (search and rescue organisations, national parks, geological offices and so on), as well as experts and policy makers, discussed the potential of satellite applications in the Alps, and what these could do for users in the environment, risk, and transport sectors. (Access the presentations here).

This document reflects some of the lessons learnt from the Eurisy conference held in Berchtesgaden on 27 October 2016. These conclusions are drawn from the discussions that took place during the event.

EURISY 20170112 Satellite Applications for the Alps Conclusions_FINAL.pdf