Last week, Forest Carbon Monitoring participated in the ESA Φ-Week, which was held as a hybrid event on the 11-15 October 2021. This fourth edition of the phi-week concentrated in New Space economy and associated innovations. The sessions, posters and side-events presented in the Phi-Week highlighted how the New Space economy is developing, and how it can contribute to the EU Green Deal, Digital Europe Programme, Destination Earth initiative, UN SDGs, and in general to the EU Space Strategy and European space sector.
The Forest Carbon Platform to be developed in the Forest Carbon Monitoring project is a good example of New Space innovations, aiming to provide scientific and technical means to utilize remotely sensed data and cloud processing to respond to increasing vegetation biomass and carbon monitoring needs. The project and platform was highlighted by Professor Tuomas Häme, from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, in an e-poster entitled ‘Service Ecosystem for Forestry in Cloud for Industry and Research’ (Note, the link leads to You Tube). A related activity, the Digital Twin Forest, was presented by Matti Mottus (VTT) in the Digital Twin Earth Precursors session. Overall, the ESA Φ-Week 2021 gave a good opportunity to see the latest developments in other New Space activities and hear views of leading scientists and policy makers on the future of New Space activities.
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