SA start-up brings space down to planet earth

Seven years ago, the European Space Agency launched a satellite called Sentinel-2a. It was noticed only by those who analyse images from space.

The satellite’s camera is a multi-spectral instrument, able to capture 13 bands of the colour spectrum. The images provide 10m resolution in red, green, blue and near-infrared, ideal for identifying and mapping crops, soil and water bodies. The images would be available at no cost, as open source data. Anyone studying land erosion, crop health, emergency management, and water quality was paying attention.

That included a small band of innovators in Pretoria, who created a start-up called Swift Geospatial, and set to work on new geographic information systems (GIS) apps to visualise and analyse geographic data.

This week they unveiled one of the fruits of their labour in Nairobi: the Geospatial Forestry Platform (GFP), combining forestry monitoring and GIS solutions to create easily digestible data for the forestry sector. Swift Geospatial founder

Michael Breetzke said: “Modern technology can help describe changes on our planet and that information should be accessible to decision makers. Better data will lead to greater success in forestry. This will have a big impact across the value chain.”

Swift Geospatial partnered with Gatsby Africa, a foundation established by David Sainsbury to accelerate economic growth in East Africa.

It targets commercial forestry to create reduce poverty.

The platform allows for actionable information on forest cover and tree health, or what

Breetzke calls “decision support” for the forestry sector.

The Sentinel-2a satellite has been joined by the Sentinel-2b, with 2C set to follow in 2024. The existing satellites enable updating images of the entire Earth’s land surface every five days, making it as close to real time as free imagery allows.

This means it can be used to map changes in land cover and to monitor the world’s forests, lakes and coastal waters. Images of the likes of floods and landslides are then used for disaster mapping and humanitarian relief efforts.

The platform and its dashboards then allow for actionable information on forest cover and tree health