Description

A relatively new era of freely available satellite data (e.g. the ESA Sentinel constellation missions) has just started and there is immense potential to support business activities, and, especially, provide supporting tools and methods to the environmental management community. This is because, although there is an abundance of free data, environmental managers still face the challenge of easily retrieving the appropriate data, correctly fuse the related information to build a coherent and usable representation in space and time, and use the data for the analysis of possible future scenarios.

The aim of this project is to investigate how freely available satellite data can be used to plan and monitor the development of forests in Scotland.The project is a step forward in the direction to exploiting space and aerospace data, technology, and computational intelligence methods for sustainable development, and the students will have the opportunity to develop knowledge, analytical and programming skills, and network connections for future research and professional activities in sustainabledevelopment.

Key Objectives

• The mining the sources of freely available satellite data, and the implementation of a search engine, for the listing of the available data given the geographical coordinates.

• The preliminary implementation of a data fusion approach for a multi sensor (e.g., multi-resolution optical, and synthetic aperture radar, SAR) analysis of the considered area.

• The testing of the implemented system on a pilot project about forest development, provided by an external institution; the test is meant to be agreed and finalised at the very beginning of the project to influence the proper development of the system.