1. Five satellite analytics tools for agriculture
During the past two years, the KappaZeta team has focused on developing services for agricultural management and analysis. Prototypes for the services were developed within the project “Satellite monitoring-based services for the insurance sector – CropCop”, supported by the European Regional Development Fund and Enterprise Estonia.
The suite of tools for agriculture includes:
- Crop Type Detection, enabling precise identification of various crop types,
- Parcel Delineation for accurate land mapping,
- Seedling Emergence Detection to monitor early crop growth,
- Farmland Damaged Area Delineation for assessing areas affected by adverse events,
- Ploughing and Harvesting Events Detection to track critical farming activities.
Learn more from our latest blog post.
2. New pilot for the Environment Agency
KappaZeta has launched a pilot project for the the Estonian Environment Agency to monitor forest clear-cutting. Automatic and timely monitoring of felling activities would free land managers from the obligation of reporting and significantly reduce the workload for inspectors.
The detection of clear-cutting will be based on radar Sentinel-1 imagery, which sees through clouds, and on optical Sentinel-2 imagery, whose spatial resolution exceeds the radar’s. The image below displays an example of what clear-cutting looks like in optical vs. radar imagery.
In two temporally consecutive optical images captured by Sentinel-2 (top row), it is visible that as of August 5, a fresh clear-cut existed in the right side of the scene. By September 11, a second clear-cut had appeared nearby. Backscatter (s0) and coherence (coh) radar images are averaged over a 2-week period to reduce noise (bottom row). In addition to that, an existing smaller clear-cut can be identified in both Sentinel-1 products, which confirms that the second clear-cut visible in the optical image from September 11 had not yet appeared by August 14.
3. KappaZeta at the Winter Satellite Workshop
KappaZeta’s delegation kicked off the new conference season at the Winter Satellite Workshop in Espoo, Finland, where we had three busy days of presentations and discussions with good people.
Tauri Tampuu demonstrated the benefits of analysis-ready SAR data for various applications, highlighting key events of the Russo-Ukraine war as seen in satellite images.
Martin Jüssi presented the concept and status of 3D-SAR, our planned bistatic SAR mission for monitoring vegetation volume from space.
Looking forward to meeting you at the next space, agtech and defence events soon!
