Seven years ago, the European Space Agency launched a satellite called Sentinel-2A. It was barely noticed, except by anyone involved in analysing images taken from space.
The reason? The satellite carried a camera called a multi-spectral instrument, able to capture 13 bands of the colour spectrum. The images provide 10m resolution in red, green, blue and near-infrared, ideal for identification and mapping of crops, soil and water bodies.
Most significantly, the images collected by the satellite would be made available to the world at no cost, as open source data. Anyone involved in studying land erosion, crop health, emergency management, and water quality was paying attention.
That included a small band of innovators in Pretoria, who immediately saw the potential. They created a start-up called Swift Geospatial, and set to work on new applications of geographic information systems (GIS), which are used to visualise and analyse geographic data.
This week they unveiled one of the fruits of their labour at an event in Nairobi. They launched the Geospatial Forestry Platform (GFP), combining forestry monitoring and GIS solutions to create easily digestible information and data for the forestry sector.
Michael Breetzke, founder of Swift Geospatial, said that while the underlying system was complex, the goal was simple: “Modern technology can better help describe the changes on our planet and that information should be more accessible to key decision makers.
Modern technology can better help describe the changes on our planet and that information should be more accessible to key decision makers
“The ability to provide a larger, more concise data set comprised of applicable information will inevitably lead to greater success in the forestry industry. This would then have a definitive impact on a multitude of industries across the value chain.”
Swift Geospatial partnered in the project with Gatsby Africa, a private foundation established by David Sainsbury “to accelerate competitive, inclusive and resilient economic growth in East Africa by demonstrating how key sectors can be transformed”.
It has targeted commercial forestry and the timber industry of East Africa as an ideal sector in which to create inclusive opportunities and jobs, and to reduce poverty.
The GFP is described as “a collection of individual monitoring modules represented and accessible through easy-to-navigate GIS dashboards pulling data and constructing data from high-quality satellite imagery”.
The platform and its dashboards then allow for actionable information on forest cover and tree health, which provides what Breetzke calls “decision support” for the forestry sector.
The most startling aspect of the platform is that, while it uses automation through code scripts, it does not rely on artificial intelligence, as do many comparable systems around the world.
This suggests that it is at the beginning of an innovation journey, which will allow for increasingly powerful solutions as newer technologies are harnessed.
At the same time, the European Space Agency is intensifying its efforts to enhance satellite imagery,
The Sentinel-2A satellite has been joined by the Sentinel-2B, with 2C set to follow in 2024. The existing satellites enable updating images of the entire Earth’s land surface every five days, making it as close to real time as free imagery allows.
This means it can be used to map changes in land cover and to monitor the world’s forests, lakes and coastal waters. Images of the likes of floods and landslides are then used for disaster mapping and humanitarian relief efforts.
The GFP uses the images in conjunction with existing resources, like the Site Species Matching Tool, a GIS-based tool that overlays growing conditions across Kenya and Tanzania — based on temperature, rainfall, evapotranspiration, soil types, soil depth and topographic data — with the requirements of different species. It then matches species to ideal climatic areas.
Swift Geospatial also collaborates with Esri, a US-based leader in GIS software, location intelligence and mapping, which uses Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure to provide a geographic approach to sustainability across the globe.
In this context, Swift Geospatial is a case study of a world-leading application of innovation to existing information resources.
• Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za
