The first phase of the GMES-project RiskEOS funded by ESA, in which EUROSENSE is involved as ‘Service Developer’ and ‘Service Provider’, was ended successfully in November 2006. This is also proven by the fruitful cooperation of EUROSENSE with the Slovak Water Management Enterprise, Danube basin, which also triggered the interest and enthusiasm of the City of Bratislava.
On a daily basis new housing, new roads, buildings and infrastructures appear in many regions across Europe. The cartographic material which represents the actual situation is outdated and is only updated every 5 or 10 years. Especially for regions with a lot of new developments and changes, for example cities in Central Europe, the existing printed maps are not updated frequently and can’t catch up with the changes on the terrain. When a natural disaster takes place, the consequences are obvious: new developments are not integrated in the geo-data used for risk management and so they are not taken into account by the rescue teams or crisis managers. This can have disastrous consequences when acting in a crisis-situation.
The service “Monitoring of elements at risk” of EUROSENSE makes it possible to frequently provide several end-users with up-to-date maps. These end-users are civil protection agencies, water management authorities and rescue organisations. The maps contain urban areas, as well as isolated buildings, industrial/ commercial/public buildings and infrastructures and/or all their changes in a fixed period of time, depending on the product.
Based on optical satellite images, several geo-data products can be produced by using a semi-automatic classification process. The overall focus of the service is to locate and to identify all civilian elements contained by areas prone to risk of natural disasters, e.g. recent or predicted flooded areas. Besides for risk mapping, these products are also very useful for urban and regional planning purposes and users.
The benefits of this service are the rapid way of updating old cartographic data for a large coverage and the possibilities of doing this on a yearly or 2-yearly basis, depending on the users’ needs. This EUROSENSE’ service is continuously improved in close cooperation with the several end-users. In that way this multi-risk service can be adapted to the specific user needs and the results can be integrated in the existing database or system.
Fig. 1 and Fig. 2. represent Bratislava and its surroundings lying very closely to the Danube River. A great
part of the city is situated approximately 4 to 5 meters below the
Danube level. In Fig. 1 and Fig. 2.C the new buildings (appeared
between 2005 and 2006) are presented in red in a 3D-perspective. In Fig. 2.A you can see the situation in 2005. Fig. 2.B represents the architectural plan of a building in 2005 in light blue.
part of the city is situated approximately 4 to 5 meters below the
Danube level. In Fig. 1 and Fig. 2.C the new buildings (appeared
between 2005 and 2006) are presented in red in a 3D-perspective. In Fig. 2.A you can see the situation in 2005. Fig. 2.B represents the architectural plan of a building in 2005 in light blue.
For more information on this service, we refer to the following contact information:
EUROSENSE
Address: Nerviërslaan 54 B-1780 Wemmel BELGIUM
Phone: +32 2 460 70 00
Fax: +32 2 460 49 58
E-mail: andre.jadot@eurosense.com
Website: http://www.eurosense.com
(Source EUROSENSE)