In an exclusive interview with GeoBuiz, Steven Krekels, Unit Manager, Remote Sensing, VITO talks about how VITO is working for Sustainable development. VITO is a research institute. VITO contributes with technological research leading to a sustainable world.Availability of food at an affordable price for everyone is Food Security for VITO. We are involved in precision farming to do crop monitoring disease detection. VITO contributes to index based insurances to safeguard the farmer’s investment. We need to translate complex data into consumable information. We need to keep the attention of organizations like the UN and FAO to ensure that data is converted into meaningful information. We have our own initiative in the satellite VITO uses data of Europe’s Sentinel series and America’s Landsat. VITO supports open data. The profitability is in what you do with the data. We need to have more and more specialist knowledge to translate the data into information. Veto is a private company but the shares are owned by the Flemish government. We do projects for Eastern European Space Agency and for the European Commission who follow open data policy. In projects of Flemish government the government dictates the policy on data.
