Even creating simple LPIS can provide knowledge and scientific address aiming at where, what and when, says Livio Rossi, Sr. Business & Development Manager, e-GEOS.
In a world facing challenges like food insecurity and malnutrition, how can adoption of Space technology make modern-day agriculture more efficient and sustainable?
Space technology can overcome the usual lack of geo-information and absence of any agronomic planning. Even creating simple LPIS worldwide can provide knowledge and scientific address aiming at where, what and when
What according to you are the biggest hurdles in technology adoption in the agriculture sector globally?
As far as technology adoption is concerned, the benefit/cost ratio can be negative if we consider single or small farms. Large area collection should be faced through strong and lightened agreements between governments and industries.
How can satellite-based Earth Observation help in making the agriculture sector more climate-resilient?
With high satellite revisits, Earth Observation technology can cover the whole agro-productive areas of the globe. The synoptic and comparative evidences of local land changes (water shortage, drought phenomena, flooding increasing, etc.) give the opportunities to be really resilient, moving crops in altitude, latitude, countries, or adapting new crop varieties where necessary, without land abandoning and the relative consequences.
How significant are geoinformation services and applications in today’s time, and what is e-Geos doing to strengthen its position in this space?
Everything that happens, happens somewhere. This is why geoinformation services and applications are moving fast towards many verticals since they can provide objective and ubiquitous insights and measurements about several parameters and environmental/anthropic phenomena. To this extent, e-GEOS is strengthening its position in this space by reinforcing the areas where we are already having excellent performances (e.g. provision of EO data and of vertical geospatial services), investing in exploring new business areas through partnership with ‘unconventional’ data providers that complement our offerings, and with vertical domain experts to exploit our competences and capabilities in brand new application contexts.
These actions are totally aligned with the new wave of the Digital Platform Economy and with the strategic direction of Europe towards the creation and exploitation of Data Spaces, where interoperability between data and services platforms is a must to enable new services based on data fusion and digital technologies (AI, Cloud, HPC).
Can you share insight on some of your other recent innovations, such as CLEOS, and what can we expect from e-Geos in 2021?
CLEOS is major step towards the scaling up of geoinformation services in terms of accessibility and interoperability, opening up a range of new opportunities for geospatial data exploitation in brand new applications. CLEOS simplifies the complexity behind managing and processing large volumes of data to distil the information required by our customers and to make it available convenient interfaces for direct exploitation into our customers’ environment. CLEOS is also about automation, allowing machine-to-machine interactions and enabling new scenarios for geoinformation integration in complex Digital Twin systems.
In 2021, e-GEOS will continue evolving CLEOS by including more geospatial data and services and opening up the developer portal to our customers. Through the developer portal, customers will have access to our development environment and they will be able to use our professional ‘kitchen’ to create new recipes and serve them though the interfaces of the marketplace — just as easy as developing an App in Google Play or Apple Store.
