Testimonials & Use Cases

Creating a buzz: How satellite imagery brought awareness to deforestation and illegal mining in a National Park

More than half of Venezuela is forested land, but according to the Global Forest Watch, the country has lost 3.2% of its tree cover in the last two decades, with eight regions alone responsible for 55% of total tree cover loss. Environmentalists are subsequently raising the alarm seeing that forested areas not only absorbed greenhouse gases, but also contribute to the economy.

SOSOrinoco was established in early 2018 to shed light on the existing body of work, especially regarding the situation in the Amazonas and Orinoco regions of Venezuela, to raise awareness of the tragedy that is occurring, and to outline some urgent measures that need to be taken to halt the unfolding human and environmental disaster.

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Tech Innovation

STAC Extensions and 0.6.2 Release

First up is the 0.6.2 release. Similar to the 0.6.1 release, it is mostly some small ‘fixes’: updated examples, spec language that wasn’t quite right, and updating the implementation page to link to more catalogs. Plus, we improved our JSON Schemas — for stricter checking of version numbers and compatibility with the last JSON Schema specs. But, we did decide that ‘minor’ releases like this one could include additional STAC extensions, as those right now are more of a community where ideas evolve. Thus, in this release, we are adding in 4 new extensions, which are all in ‘proposal’ status of our Extension Maturity classification. This means that they are solid ideas seeking more input from real-world implementations. As extensions get more implementations and testing, it will move up the maturity classification to become stable extensions that everyone can rely upon.

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Testimonials & Use Cases

When your town is burning, every second counts

Tracking fires at the urban-wildland interface with Planet Labs and Radiant Earth Foundation
Cape Town is world renowned for its scenic beauty. Table Mountain looms large over the city, with the urban environment wedged between its steep cliffs and the oceans surrounding the Peninsula. These attractions draw millions of tourists every year and entice locals to build their homes in close proximity to the natural environment. But this proximity comes with substantial risks. The natural vegetation of the region — an evergreen shrubland locally known as ‘fynbos’ — is prone to regular, high severity fires.

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News

Satellite Journalism – The Big Picture

Journalist Mark Corcoran publishes a paper on the growth of satellite imagery in journalism. In the paper, he “examines media case studies, the two dominant US providers of commercial satellite imagery to media and raises questions on the applications and limitations of new satellite journalism. What is the potential of satellite newsgathering for journalists? How can journalists independently authenticate images provided by a third party? What are the censorship issues? What technical proficiency is required to interpret images? In an age when anyone with a credit card and internet access can already download archived satellite imagery, what are the security issues and responsibilities of journalists? And gazing into the not so distant future, what might satellite journalism look like 5 to 10 years from now?”

Download the paper below.

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Testimonials & Use Cases

My 10-Year Challenge: Glacier National Park

How I used a meme and satellite imagery to show the devastation of climate change — and you can too.
The effects of climate change aren’t always big shocks — often, it takes place over the years. What better way is there to show what we have lost than using a fun internet meme like the “10-year challenge?” I used the Radiant Earth Foundation platform and historical US Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat satellite imagery to show how glaciers have disappeared from Glacier National Park — and, following my process, you can produce an image just like it.

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News

Radiant Earth Foundation’s 2018 Annual Report — Good Wishes for 2019!

I am pleased to present Radiant Earth Foundation’s 2018 Annual Report, documenting our journey connecting the global development community to Earth imagery and tools, as well as supporting the advancement of a vibrant cohort of spatial data users worldwide.

2018 proved to be another exciting year for Radiant Earth Foundation, in particular with the launch of our open source satellite imagery platform. The platform marked a key milestone of our original commitment to provide license-free data and tools to people around the world.

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Tech Innovation

SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) Community Advances and 0.6.1 Release

Though we’ve been quiet on public forums, the momentum on SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs (STAC) continues to grow. I’m quite pleased by the latest advances, as it is almost all real-world implementation work that is driving improvements to the specification by grappling with large and diverse catalogs. The community has also been expanding to more types of data, which is quite exciting to see.

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News

Kicking Off 2019, Strengthening Collaborations, Advancing Machine Learning

As a neutral entity, Radiant Earth Foundation enjoys the unique opportunity to work with diverse partners worldwide and recognizes the important role it plays in engaging and facilitating people, as well as organizations, to work together for the benefit of the development community.

That’s why in December we convened machine learning and remote sensing experts from around the world for an evening of networking and sharing of ideas in Washington. D.C., on the heels of the 2018 American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting. Sponsored by Omidyar Network, the community-building event included more than 80 academic, government, business, and non-profit representatives.

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Thought Leadership

Commercial Entrants are Driving Innovation in Earth Observation — and That is All Good!

In the last installment of this blog series on the value of Earth observation (EO) data, we focused on government supplied satellite data and its use in progressing global development solutions. Government EO data are predominately characterized by high to low spatial resolution, a consistent revisit rate, constant imaging that allows for routine monitoring, and, a deep archive of data to be built up and relied upon (United Nations, 2017, p. 42 and Green et al., 2017, p. 51). In the case of the Landsat and Sentinel programs, the data are open and free to use and hosted on multiple sites globally. These satellites tend to be large, very expensive to build and launch, and can take a decade to go from design to launch and then to operations.

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