Sao Paulo, May 19, 2009
Spot Image and Infoterra, affiliates of EADS Astrium, announce the launch in Brazil of SPOTCana. This is a new service tailored to monitoring sugar cane plantations, a crop that is being grown increasingly in the country, notably in the State of Sao Paulo where it used to produce ethanol.
Spot Image, with support from Infoterra, is now proposing an online subscription service to give the sugar industry—cane growers, distilleries, environmental departments and insurance companies—precise, ready-to-use maps throughout the growth cycle.
Subscribers can thus acquire information to closely monitor their crops, precisely ascertain growth, maturity and stress for timely decision-making, and manage their priorities.
SPOTCana provides information on crop maturity derived from high-resolution satellite imagery. This information is delivered at key stages of the growth cycle to support estimation of available biomass and detection of yield disparities between fields.
Subscribers are alerted each time new data are available for their region of interest. Each delivery comprises a satellite image and two vegetation maps:
• a green vegetation map showing crop density, an indicator of healthy growth;
• a dry vegetation map pinpointing crop problems and indicating the degree of maturity at the end of the growth cycle.
A link on the portal is provided to retrieve data and view them in Google Earth.
Following in the footsteps of the Farmstar online crop monitoring service for cereal growers, SPOTCana confirms the utility of remote-sensing services for agriculture and the know-how and innovative solutions developed by Spot Image and Infoterra in this area.
Conclusive tests
A preliminary experiment was conducted in 2008 for a test zone in the State of Sao Paulo. Because sugar cane quality is affected if the crop has to be transported more than 20 kilometres to the distillery, initial efforts focused on mapping fields around production facilities in order to define how many satellites images would be needed to cover all zones to be analysed.
Tasked SPOT imagery was therefore acquired at four stages in the sugar cane’s growth cycle. Spot Image automatically orthorectified images and applied a regular grid to them, then Infoterra processed the images to calculate biophysical parameters indicative of plant water stress, chlorophyll activity and other factors.
Following the success of this experiment, all growers in the State of Sao Paulo can now subscribe to the service through a dedicated Web portal.
For more information, contact:
Spot Image Brasil – Pedro Soares
Tél : +55 (11) 51815184
Pedro.soares@ext.spotimage.com
Spot Image – Corporate Communications
Phone: +33 (0)5 62 19 40 10
anne-marie.bernard@spotimage.fr
About Spot Image
Spot Image is a world-leading provider of high-added-value satellite imagery and geospatial services. As the commercial operator of the SPOT satellites and a supplier of imagery from a range of other optical and radar Earth-imaging satellites, Spot Image has perfected the ability to harness space- and ground-based systems to meet users’ needs. It has developed a far-reaching global network of receiving stations, partners and distributors to bring geospatial information products and services to public -and private-sector decision-makers worldwide.
Spot Image recently opened a new subsidiary, Spot Image Brasil, in Sao Paulo.
Spot Image is 81% owned by Astrium Services, an EADS affiliate.
About Infoterra
Infoterra, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Astrium, is a leading provider of geo-information products and services for managing the development, environment and security of our changing world. With entities in France, Germany, Hungary, Spain and the United Kingdom, its customers include international corporations, governments and authorities around the globe, and organizations such as the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA). Infoterra operates across a comprehensive range of markets spanning telecommunications, environment, security, agriculture, defence, energy and many other sectors besides.
Furthermore, Infoterra holds the exclusive commercial exploitation rights for the high-resolution TerraSAR-X radar satellite and is playing a leading role supplying geo-information services for the European GMES initiative led by the EC and ESA.
Infoterra and Spot Image together form the Earth Observation Division of Astrium Services.
