Month: October 2018

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Teagasc Spatial Analysis team among the finalists for 2018 Farming by Satellite Prize

The Teagasc Food Research Centre Ashtown – Spatial Analysis Unit team was shortlisted to participate from 3rd  to 6th of December 2018 in the final stage of the competition Farming by Satellite Prize, an EU initiative by the European GNSS Agency in cooperation with the European Environment Agency. 

Richa Marwaha, Azucena Jiménez Castañeda and Gabriela Afrasinei will present their new idea at the final stage of the competition at Marseille (France), and the Award Ceremony. The team submitted an innovative entry on “Feed On DemanD – wEdge & gRazing App” – FODDERApp, an innovative precision agriculture tool targeting grassland farmers, designed as an integrated satellite-based grass management data delivery WebGIS platform.

The aim of the competition is to promote the use of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Earth Observation (EO) in agriculture and its benefits to farmers, consumers, food security and geo-traceability, remote sensing technologies, sustainable land management, and the environment. Individuals or teams can contribute new ideas and innovations, particularly those relying upon European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), the forthcoming European Galileo system and Copernicus. Entries can be about any type of agriculture in any part of Europe.

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New INSPIRE Geoportal launched in September 2018

The European Commission has launched the new INSPIRE Geoportal offering easier access to spatial data in the EU […] The INSPIRE Geoportal makes it easier to discover, monitor and directly use geospatial data sets relevant for specific application areas, in particular European environmental policy. The new Geoportal provides overviews of the availability of INSPIRE data sets by country and thematic area, and makes the data available and ready-for-use in a range of applications. The INSPIRE Geoportal was launched at the 2018 INSPIRE Conference in Antwerp, Belgium.

Inspire portal

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Python automation for the ESA Copernicus Programme

Recently, I had the chance to play around with the Copernicus Python implementations. The package “sentinelsat“ contains a great Python API for automating the search and download procedure for Sentinel missions 1 to 3. The “snappy” package is a Python interface for running ESA Snap applications. The “snappy” package can be tricky to install, especially on company computers with limited rights, and the official documentation is also very limited. There is however a lot of help available in various blogs and forums.  Once installed most SNAP functions can easily be automated. With a combination of these two packages a simple script will download and pre-process a large amount of images overnight. The example below is a time-lapse of Sentinel-1 SAR images for the Irish National Ploughing Championships in Co. Offaly (first image from the 26th August, last image from the 1st October). While the low resolution somewhat limits what can be seen, the area of the NPC shows up very clear, as the growing white area in the middle of the image. As the site is prepared, increasing disturbance and the growing number of objects increases the sites back scatter properties making it brighter in the images.NPC_2018

I will hold a workshop on the “sentinelsat” and “snappy” packages on the second day of the Irish Earth Observation Symposium 2018 (6th to 7th December 2018 in the Teagasc Conference Centre, Ashtown). If you are interested, sign up early as places are limited.