Big data and remote sensing

Our huge data sets about habitat and species distribution and satellite and other remote sensing bring us into a whole new realm of innovation for decision support, evidence-based science and modelling the future. It allows us to work with business, industry and others to provide robust and sustainable decisions.

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These are all questions that can now be answered by a clever combination of in situ data and satellite and drone images. Currently, existing vegetation images are becoming more accessible and there is a huge increase in freely available and commercial satellite images. For example, the European Sentinel satellites make weekly images of the entire earth with a resolution of 10m. In addition, there are many microsatellites, such as PlanetScope cubesats, which produce daily images at even higher resolutions (around 3m). For even higher resolutions (around 1cm of detail), we use drones that we can deploy ourselves with the desired camera type, time and location. All this information forms big data, which we can analyse using smart techniques in combination with data from the field. Ultimately, this is about characterising and classifying vegetation, habitats and other objects in the field, and tracking changes in them over the long term.

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News on big data and remote sensing

Read more in the dossier