The consortium
UCLouvain-Geomatics – Université Catholique de Louvain
The UCLouvain-Geomatics research group is part of the Earth and Life Institute (ELI) of the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium. At the convergence between societal issues and scientific challenges, ELI has the ambition to address the complexity of the Earth related systems at multiple spatial and temporal scales.
Defined by end-user needs and close collaborations with international and private companies, the UCL-Geomatics research strategy is centered on developing automated methods for land cover mapping and change detection at various scales, from local to global. Methods using synergies between optical and SAR remote sensing have also been developed to monitor the land surface dynamics in the agriculture and forestry sectors. The team expertise includes canopy biophysical variable retrieval using radiative transfer modelling, comprehensive field experiments and advanced image processing techniques, including object-based approaches and multivariate statistical methods applied to space-time analyses. Through several international challenging projects (GLC2000, ESA-GLOBCOVER, Geoland-2, WWW, L3JRC, etc) the team has acquired a unique expertise in mass processing of very large volumes of data enabling it to handle all earth observation scales from the very high resolution imagery to the global daily time series. The research activities also develop geographical information system applications supporting multidisciplinary modelling and participatory dynamics for natural resources management in both tropical and temperate regions.
CS Group – Romania
CS ROMANIA was founded in 1991 by a group of research engineers and university professors, under the name of AEIC (Automation, Electronics, Informatics and Consulting), and joined the CS Communication & Systèmes Group in 1998, becoming an excellence center of software services for Aeronautics, Space, Energy & Industry and Transportation, as well as an outsourcing center for development and maintenance of software applications.
Building on the expertise of its founders and CS Group, CS ROMANIA developed three main business lines: Development and Maintenance of Software Applications, Embedded Systems and Command & Control Systems.
A major business line of CS ROMANIA is the provision of services for the development and the maintenance of software applications and information systems. CS ROMANIA offerings follow all the stages of software development, starting from functional specifications and concluding with validation tests. CS ROMANIA undertakes all or just part of the development process of software applications and respects rigorous quality standards assuring the traceability of exigencies, together with the configuration management. CS ROMANIA has been serving mainly four industries, namely Aeronautics, Space, Intelligent Transportation and Energy.
e-GEOS
e-GEOS is a joint venture between Telespazio S.p.A. (80%) and the Italian Space Agency (20%), entered into force on June 2009. The two shareholders have assigned to e-GEOS respectively the whole EO Division and the world-wide exclusive distribution of data and services from the COSMO-SkyMed Constellation, developed by ASI in cooperation with the Italian Ministry of Defence.
e-GEOS is a leading international player in the EO and Geo-Spatial Information business. e-GEOS offers a unique portfolio of applications services, also thanks to the monitoring capabilities of COSMO-SkyMed Constellation, and has acquired leading position within European Copernicus Program. Application services include: monitoring for environmental protection, rush mapping in support to natural disaster management and humanitarian aid, specialized products for defence and intelligence, oil spill and ship detection for maritime surveillance, interferometric measurements for landslides and ground subsidence analysis, thematic mapping for agriculture and forestry.
e-GEOS is one of the main industrial players in the Copernicus Program and is a world leader in environmental and maritime monitoring and in rapid mapping for the management of natural disasters and humanitarian crises, cooperating with EMSA (European Maritime Safety Agency), EU SatCen (European Union Satellite Centre) / EUSC (European Union Satellite Centre), JRC (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission), various UN Organizations and the Italian Civil Defence.
e-GEOS premises are deployed on two distinct sites with distinct functionalities: (i) Rome Headquarter for Marketing & Sales, Product Development and Administration functions and (ii) Matera Space Center for acquisition, archiving and processing of multi-mission satellite data including COSMO-SkyMed Constellation and ESA Sentinels.
e-GEOS is part of the Telespazio (Leonardo/Thales) group, that operates the largest civil space infrastructure in the world, at the Fucino Space Centre, and owns GAF GmbH. e-GEOS can rely also on the specific know-how and market presence of the various companies within the group and the Telespazio subsidiaries network (Spain, UK, France, Romania, Argentina and Brazil), besides other strategic partners and distributors that enrich its competitive advantages and provide synergies in the product chain and for market development at international level. e-GEOS current number of employees is 256, between the two company sites of Rome and Matera.
GISAT
GISAT is a privately owned Czech SME based in Prague. The mission of the company is to provide its clients a complete portfolio of value added, high quality and state-of-the-art geoinformation services based on Earth Observation technology. Remote sensing related geo-information services represent more than 60% of the company’s annual revenue. The rest comes from GISAT’s growing portfolio of services related to innovative data integration, exploration and visualisation using web and mobile platforms. The company is ISO9001 & ISO14001 certified to guarantee the quality of provided services and to reflect the responsibility in environmental impacts of its activities.
GISAT’s team has proven expertise in automated statistical and image analysis techniques including OBIA, machine learning and semi-automated approaches. Specialized processing chains for land use/land cover mapping, feature extraction, agricultural monitoring, land subsidence, floods or vegetation evolution from various optical and radar sensors have been developed in frame of research or operational projects. The company’s specialists use both COTS and open source tools to facilitate effective geo-spatial intelligence extraction from EO imagery.
The company is well established amongst European EO services providers within the three priority thematic domains of the European Copernicus initiative: Land Monitoring, Emergency Response and Security. Furthermore, GISAT is a long-term partner of European Environmental Agency (EEA) in frame of European Topic Centre on urban and land use. Also, GISAT has implemented number of CAP & IACS related operational projects focused to crop and grassland mapping, agricultural subsidy control, agro-meteorological modelling & crop yield forecasting or precision farming.
Sinergise
Sinergise is a SME from Slovenia with extensive expertise in developing advanced geospatial information systems based on web technology. It has experts in the field of user needs and system design, software development, database administration and system infrastructure.
Sinergise has successfully completed several projects involving spatial data capture and spatial data analysis for customers in Europe and Africa. Their products can be grouped in agriculture, real estate and cloud GIS. Agriculture-related systems include those covering CAP legislation (LPIS, OTSC, CwRS, rural development, etc.) as well as agro-environmental and animal/crop disease applications. Real-estate management deals with land administration, cadastre, deeds (land titles and mortgages) and Computer Aided Mass Appraisal (CAMA). Cloud GIS solutions include Geopedia, crowd-sourcing platform, and Sentinel Hub, award winning satellite imagery archiving, processing and distribution service, which powers several earth observation applications in Europe, Africa, United States and Australia and at this moment processes two million requests per week, crunching more than quadrillion satellite imagery pixels from Sentinel, Landsat, Planet, RapidEye and other missions.
In 12 years of operations Sinergise built solutions for large governmental clients in Europe (United Kingdom, France, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, Moldova) and Africa (Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Mauritius), almost all of them still being supported nowadays. Altogether, there are more than 2 million people annually using Sinergise’s tools and its technology helps to manage more than 50 million property records and more than 500 million EUR of transactions annually.
Paying Agencies from the Pilot Countries
Czech Republic
State Agricultural Intervention Fund (SZIF) |
Netherlands
Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) |
Spain, Castilla y León
Instituto Tecnológico Agrario de Castilla y León (ITACyL) – Castilla I Léon Paying Agency
Fondo Español de Garantía Agraria (FEGA) – Spanish coordination body |
Lithuania
National Paying Agency under the Ministry of Agriculture |
Romania
Agency for Payments and Intervention in Agriculture (APIA) |
Italy
Agenzia per le Erogazioni in Agricoltura (AGEA) – Italian Coordinating Body |
The Steering Committee
The SEN4CAP project is continuously relying on the guidance of a steering committee composed of the EC actors of the CAP, namely representatives from DG-Agri (Unit D.3), DG-JRC (Food Security unit) and DG-Grow (Copernicus). The steering committee is providing advice and guidance to ESA on the evolving CAP policy and legal framework, the technical guidelines of the IACS implementation and the Copernicus context.