Announcement of the Awarded Projects in the GEO-Amazon Programme

Sentinel Hub supports projects to advance our understanding of the Earth

In one of our previous blog posts we have announced our support of Group on Earth Observations (GEO) — Amazon Web Services (AWS) Earth Observation Cloud Credits Programme and introduced details of GEO and AWS partnership. The Programme committed to award projects improving understanding of our planet with $1.5 million USD worth of cloud services, grants and technical support. The resources will help 21 projects from 17 developing countries to realize the potential of Earth Observation (EO) for sustainable development.

Facing food uncertainty, managing water resources, planning sustainable secure cities and dealing with the impacts of climate change represent a huge challenge to national governments. These challenges are particularly hard to handle in developing countries with limited resources and poor internet connectivity. Access to large volumes of EO data which would help them measure, monitor and manage their efforts are crucial for their progress. With direct involvement in the Programme, the awardees will be able to access free cloud services which will help them with hosting, processing and analysis of EO data.

Awarded Projects

21 projects from 17 developing countries have been approved to receive support which will help them compensate the cost of developing cloud-based sustainability applications using EO data. Beside access to AWS Promotional Credits they will also receive support from the GEO community and AWS experts who will help them achieve best possible results.

Awarded projects will provide development of applications covering various fields, such as monitoring of wildfires, managing ground water resources, improving agricultural yield to mapping and monitoring of forested areas. They are all contributing to activities of the GEO Work Programme, and GEO’s engagement priorities (the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement for Climate and the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development).

Among the awarded projects using Sentinel Hub service, which enables access to the most commonly used satellite datasets (Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, USGS Landsat, Aqua and Terra MODIS and others), we can find the following ones:

• Fire Monitoring Service, Tsinghua University, China
• agriBORA — Geodata for actionable farm intelligence, Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), Kenya
• EO For Sustainable Development, National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI, Mexico), Mexico/Colombia
• Operational monitoring system of ground deformations in Nigeria, Department of Geoinformatics and Surveying, University of Nigeria, Nigeria
• Deep Learning for Satellite Monitoring of Illegal Amber Mining in Ukraine, Kharkiv National University, Ukraine
• Monitoring Rice Paddy and Flood in the Lower Mekong Basin, HCMC Space Technology Application Center, Vietnam

The complete list of awarded projects is available here.

For more information about the GEO-AWS Cloud Credits Programme visit the Programme’s official web page and their Announcement of Cloud Grants.