ScanEx, announced today the launch of the innovation partnership program “Open Landscape”. The program will officially start on October 1, 2013. Founding members of the “Open Landscape” program include : ScanEx Research and Development Center and NGO “Transparent World” together with the World Bank, the World Resources Institute,members of the Global Forest Watch 2.0 and the Global Tiger Initiative. The program is supported by DigitalGlobe, NASA, and other satellite imagery data providers.
The aim of the “Open Landscape” program is to strengthen the public’s ability to monitor environmental “hot spots” and protected heritage sites across our planet. To monitor these protected heritage sites the program plans to use multi-temporal high resolution satellite images managed by crowd mapping volunteers from around the world using open sourced monitoring tools.
The “Open Landscape” program will engage local universities and non-profit organizations in Russia. They will also include organizations outside of Russia experienced in land-use monitoring(national parks, other protected natural areas, municipalities, departments of regional planning, local forest subdivisions and hunting farms) who are interested in the responsible management of critical habitat areas.
The “Open Landscape” program will provide:
• Access to the Transparent World portal with sets of high resolution satellite images for the areas of interest with simplified licensing terms;
• User-friendly software for visualization of satellite imagery for monitoring purposes
• Training on the basic use of data, analysis, and interpretation of satellite images, as well as crowd-mapping.
The materials obtained after the first stage of the “Open Landscape” program will be published on the www.openlandscape.info portal. Lessons learned will be used to develop better processes for the distribution and analysis of remote sensing data by the public and non-profit organizations for the purpose of environmental monitoring, also within the framework of the “Space Patrol” public space monitoring system operation.
In June 2013, ScanEx RDC and DigitalGlobe signed an agreement under which the Russian and foreign participants of the “Open Landscape” program will be able to view highly detailed archived images acquired from the WorldView-2 satellite. Detailed plans of the first stage of the “Open Landscape” partnership program were presented and discussed with potential users during the 6th International Conference “Earth from Space – the Most Effective Solutions”.
