Louvain4Space Projects

Project description

GNSS-R is a technique to carry out Earth observation based on reflections on the ground (or sea, or ice) of signals originating from GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signals. The proposed project consists of educating a new generation of experts, at doctoral level, able to bring a qualitative leap to this technology. The scientific and technological goal consists of developing such systems based on a synchronized constellation of Cubesats. An important advantage of this arrangement is the very low cost of cubesats and the possibility to increase resolution based on beamforming from the satellites. Ground truth, as well as some of the methods, will originate from near-field radar technology. This will require further research on all segments of GNSS-R technology and beyond: launching and adjustment of cubesat formations, RF synchronization, interferometry between moving platforms, calibration of RF front-ends, ground testing making use of drones, cubesat systems, on-board processing, data transfer and analysis, translation into ground truth and into predictions important for climate change studies and for optimal territory management. The project may also benefit to other technologies making use of interferometry, such as radio-astronomy and phased array based communications. It is also expected to assist industry segments making use of GNSS signals, such as precision agriculture, forestry and sea and land management.

Funding Body: European Union - Horizon Europe MSCA-Doctoral Network

UCLouvain Promotor: Christophe Craeye

Duration: March 2024 -Feb. 2028

External partners:

• UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN (Coordination)
• TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT DELFT
• UNIVERSITE DU LUXEMBOURG
• SYNTONY
• AGENCIA ESTATAL CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS
• INSTITUT SUPERIEUR DE L'AERONAUTIQUE ET DE L'ESPACE
• HYDROSCAN NV
• UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE CATALUNYA
• THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
• POLYCHORD LTD

Website: GLITTER

Summary:

New Space and Space 4.0 have been emerging over the last few decades, enabling easier accessiblity to space and the development of new markets, with new opportunities to seize. European companies must already position themselves among the main private actors while developing a sustainable spatial sector embodied in the social and economic structure. Moreover, the Green Deal and European Union recovery plan offer various opportunities to develop space related, environmental-friendly projects. The Walloon Government also identified the space sector as vital in their Regional Policy Declaration in their legislature 2019-2024.  Structuring the Walloon driving force in the spatial field requires better coordination between the administrations, universities, and research centers with the industrial sector in order to support research projects within a high-end technological platform. They will consist in meeting advanced technological challenges covering the entire spatial value chain, from manufacturing, instrumentation and launching to post-processing and data services. Particularly, constellations of Smallsats are capable of answering vital societal challenges, such as the monitoring the human global footprint on Earth. Developing disruptive technologies facilitating Earth observation can widen fundamental research perspectives in the framework of sustainable development (climate, agriculture, pollution, etc), and serve direct applications related to global communication and cybersecurity.

​Space4Relaunch is a collaborative program revolving around two of the sectors combining high accessibility of the Walloon industrial landscape, and high attractiveness to world space markets. The research promoted by this program will be carried out through a total of 30 PhD theses answering cutting-edge technological challenges towards adequate Technology Level Readiness for industrial needs in the spatial sector.​

​Space4ReLaunch regroups two researches axes complementing each other for a common roadmap: Win4Space, which is dedicated to Earth observation, and Win4ReLaunch, which focuses on reusable launchers. The Joint Research Institute For Space (JRI4SPACE) has also been created in order to strenghten the synergies between all the actors in the spatial area, and to develop a cross-disciplinary approach for the identified strategic innovation domains.

Funding Body: Région Wallonne - Win4Excellence

UCLouvain Promotor(s): Philippe Chatelain, Denis Flandre, Dimitri Lederer, Clément Lauzin, Christophe Craeye, Claude Oestges Pierre Defourny, Aude Simar, Bruno Dehez

External Partner(s): ULB, ULiège, UCLouvain, Multitel, Sirris, CENAERO, Budget UCLouvain

Website: Space4Relaunch

Project description

Since 2015 the 3DEES has been developed as a science-class instrument that is optimized for the measurement of angle resolved electron spectra (6 angles) in the energy range 0.1 - 10 MeV in the Earth’s radiation belts. It will be embarked as a technology demonstration on-board PROBA-3. The satellite is scheduled to be launched in 2024 into a highly elliptical orbit and will cover parts of the inner radiation belt, outer belt and mostly the border of the magnetosphere. Thus, the objectives of the 3DEES mission are to give an accurate picture of the high-energy electron population in the magnetosphere for scientific studies of their acceleration and loss processes, through measure of angle resolved energy spectra of electrons, which constitute boundary conditions to advanced physics models. This is one of the rare instruments for this kind of studies that performs in parallel measurements in several looking directions. The mission also targets to deliver Space Weather data for now- and forecasting activities.

Keywords, main expertise : Space radiation instrument design, electron spectrometer

Funding bodies : ESA-GSTP, ESA-PRODEX

UCLouvain promotor(s): Véronique Dehant, Sylvie Benck

Researcher(s): Stanislav Borisov

External partners :Redwire (formerly QinetiQ Space), BIRA-IASB

Webpage(s): 3DEES and 3DEES

Summary

The EPT is an energetic particle spectrometer that was designed to provide high quality (so-called “science-class”) measurements of energetic protons (9.5 – 248 MeV) and helium particles (38 – 980 MeV) as well as electrons (0.5 – 8 MeV), in the near-Earth environment. After development activities during around 8 years funded by ESA, the EPT was launched on 7 May 2013 on-board PROBA-V into a low earth circular orbit of 820 km altitude. Optimised for light ion detection, EPT provides a good description of their population in the inner radiation belt as well as a good characterization of solar energetic particle events. EPT data also allows studies of the dynamics of the electron radiation belts. It is providing data almost continuously since the launch of the mission and the next year the EPT will have covered a solar cycle (~ 11 years). The PROBA-V/EPT mission is one among few long-lasting missions that provide high quality energetic particles measurements, thanks also to the robustness of the PROBA satellite platform (the first one is still in operation since 2001). Since 2016 the EPT data are part of the ESA Space Weather Service Network wherein they provide various products relevant for space radiation effects assessment.

Keywords, main expertise: Space radiation instrument design, electron and light ion spectrometer, radiation belts, space weather

Funding bodies: ESA-GSTP, ESA-PRODEX, ESA-SSP

UCLouvain promotor(s): Véronique Dehant, Sylvie Benck

Researcher: Stanislav Borisov

External partners: ASRO (FI), Redwire (formerly QinetiQ Space), BIRA-IASB, B.USOC

Link to existing Webpage(s): EPT

Short Project description:

In April 2023 started the development of a miniaturized version of the EPT that is in operation on-board PROBA-V since almost 11 years. This version is intended to perform high quality measurements of directional electron (0.1-10 MeV) and proton (3-300 MeV) fluxes in space (science class). The challenge in this project is to develop a light charged particle spectrometer of reduced size i.e. to compact the EPT from an instrument of shoe box size to one of praline box (less than half a liter), but keep the same performance in electron and proton detection in terms of energy range covered.

Keywords, main expertise: Space radiation instrument design, electron-proton spectrometer

Funding bodies: ESA-PRODEX

UCLouvain promotor(s): Véronique Dehant, Sylvie Benck, Christophe Craeye

Researcher(s): Stanislav Borisov, Maxime Drouguet, Benoît Herman, Pierre Gérard

External partners: B.USOC

Project description:

This project aims at studying the interior of Mars, Mercury, the Moon and natural satellites, and the small bodies of our Solar System by means of geodesy observation and modeling.

Extended project description:

Our investigations focus on the gravity field, the rotation, the tides and the interior structure of these celestial bodies. We contribute to the development of observation strategies of BepiColombo and JUICE, and develop scientific models of the rotation, tides, interior structure and evolution of terrestrial planets and icy satellites in order to improve and refine the interpretation of the upcoming space missions such as BepiColombo and JUICE. We analyze radio science data of the Mars missions InSight in order to study the Martian interior and atmosphere and to prepare for a future LaRa (lander radioscience) mission. We develop interior structure and dynamics models of Mars to improve our understanding of the Martian interior from the interpretation of radio science data. We develop tools and methods to deduce the interior structure of low-gravity objects such as Phobos and the binary asteroid Didymos-Dimorphos, in preparation for the MMX and Hera missions that will soon be visiting them. We complement our studies with data from other geophysical instruments and experiments (e.g. magnetometers, gravimeters).

Keywords, main expertise: Geodesy, celestial bodies rotation, gravity and interior, radioscience

Funding bodies : PRODEX, BELSPO, FNRS

UCLouvain promotor: Sebastien Le Maistre

Researcher(s):

• Staff: Sebastien Le Maistre, Jeremy Rekier, Veronique Dehant
• PhD: ShengAn Shih, Valerio Filice, Alfonso Caldiero, Marta Goli, Guilhem Chicot

External partners: Royal Observatory of Belgium, AntwerpSpace

Webpage(s)

• Spin state and deep interior structure of Mars from InSight radio tracking (article in Nature)
• LARA

Link to video materials

Project description

BelSAR-Campaign, BelSAR-Science, and BelSAR-Publication are ESA and BELSPO funded projects aimed at collecting and exploiting innovative remote sensing data for advanced bistatic SAR processing, change detection, and agriculture and soil moisture monitoring applications.

Keywords, main expertise

Remote sensing ; synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ; agriculture ; hydrology

Funding bodies

European Space Agency (ESA) and Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO)

UCLouvain promotor

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher

Jean Bouchat

External partners

Universiteit Gent, Centre Spatial de Liège (ULiège), and Royal Military Academy

Link to existing Webpage(s)

https://eo.belspo.be/en/stereo-in-action/projects/soil-and-crop-monitoring-simultaneous-mono-and-bistatic-radar

https://eo.belspo.be/en/news/belsar-science-bridging-gap-agricultural-remote-sensing-bistatic-radar

Project description

The European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative High-Resolution Land Cover project is dedicated to accurately describing and analyzing land cover (LC) and land cover change (LCC) using Earth Observation (EO) data with high spatial resolution (10-30m) to study the role of spatial resolution in Land Cover and its changes to support climate modelling research at a regional scale. The project specifically targets the LC classification of the year 2020 across three key regions: South America (with a focused emphasis on the Amazon forest), West Africa (encompassing the Sahel band), and Western Siberia. Additionally, the project generates historical LC and LCC products from 1990 for smaller regions at a spatial resolution of 30 meters, based on Landsat data.

Keywords, main expertise

Earth observation, regional land cover and land cover change mapping, Essential Climate Variables, classification and time series analysis for land cover change detection.

UCLouvain is responsible for validating the land cover and land cover change classifications.

Funding bodies

European Space Agency (ESA)

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Céline Lamarche, Thomas De Maet

External partners

• Università degli studi di Trento (UNITN), Italy
• Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Italy
• Università degli studi di Pavia (UNIPV), Italy
• Università degli studi di Genova (UNIGE), Italy
• Politecnico di Milano (PoliMi), Italy
• Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (LSCE), France
• CREAF, Spain
• e-GEOS, Italy
• GeoVille, Austria
• Planetek Italia, Italy

Webpage(s)

https://climate.esa.int/en/projects/high-resolution-land-cover/about/

Summary

The European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative Land Cover (ESA CCI LC) project focuses on developing advanced global land cover products with long-term consistency from 1992 to present. The primary objective is to contribute essential data for monitoring the Land Cover Essential Climate Variable (LC ECV). The project operates within the Copernicus Climate Change service framework, aiming to operationally deliver accurate and up-to-date land cover maps to support climate research and analysis.

Extended project description

Within this program, the land cover project addressed the requirements of the climate science community by providing a series of 6 interoperable and consistent products: (i) a series of global land cover maps at 300m from 1992 to present consistent in space and time, (ii) a companion map series of Plant Functional Types, readily usable in climate models, (iii) 3 global land cover seasonality products describing a 15y- averaged behaviour of the vegetation greenness, the snow and the burned areas occurrence along the year, (iv) a global map of open permanent water bodies at 300m, (v) the full archive (2003-2012) of MERIS time series processed in 7-day composites, and (vi) a user tool for re-projecting, re-sampling and converting the products into climate model inputs.

Taking advantage of the Sentinel era, the project also generated a 10-m prototype map with a legend of 10 classes over Africa, based on Sentinel-2 and supplemented by Landsat-8.

Keywords, main expertise

Earth observation, Global land cover and land cover change mapping, Essential Climate Variables, Classification and time series analysis for land cover change detection

UCLouvain is Prime Investigator of the ESA CCI LC project since 2010

Funding bodies

European Space Agency, European Union

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Céline Lamarche, Thomas De Maet

External partners

• Brockmann Consult (BC), Germany
• Met Office - Hadley Centre (MOHC), United Kingdom
• Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l'Environnement (LSCE), France

Webpage

https://climate.esa.int/en/projects/land-cover/about/

https://maps.elie.ucl.ac.be/CCI/viewer/index.php

https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/satellite-land-cover?tab=overview

Video materials

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2018/01/Changing_lands

Summary

The European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative Land Cover (ESA CCI LC) project focuses on developing advanced global land cover products with long-term consistency from 1992 to present. The primary objective is to contribute essential data for monitoring the Land Cover Essential Climate Variable (LC ECV). The project operates within the Copernicus Climate Change service framework, aiming to operationally deliver accurate and up-to-date land cover maps to support climate research and analysis.

Extended project description

Within this program, the land cover project addressed the requirements of the climate science community by providing a series of 6 interoperable and consistent products: (i) a series of global land cover maps at 300m from 1992 to present consistent in space and time, (ii) a companion map series of Plant Functional Types, readily usable in climate models, (iii) 3 global land cover seasonality products describing a 15y- averaged behaviour of the vegetation greenness, the snow and the burned areas occurrence along the year, (iv) a global map of open permanent water bodies at 300m, (v) the full archive (2003-2012) of MERIS time series processed in 7-day composites, and (vi) a user tool for re-projecting, re-sampling and converting the products into climate model inputs.

Taking advantage of the Sentinel era, the project also generated a 10-m prototype map with a legend of 10 classes over Africa, based on Sentinel-2 and supplemented by Landsat-8.

Keywords, main expertise

Earth observation, Global land cover and land cover change mapping, Essential Climate Variables, Classification and time series analysis for land cover change detection

UCLouvain is Prime Investigator of the ESA CCI LC project since 2010

Funding bodies

European Space Agency, European Union

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Céline Lamarche, Thomas De Maet

External partners

• Brockmann Consult (BC), Germany
• Met Office - Hadley Centre (MOHC), United Kingdom
• Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l'Environnement (LSCE), France

Link to existing Webpage(s)

https://climate.esa.int/en/projects/land-cover/about/

https://maps.elie.ucl.ac.be/CCI/viewer/index.php

https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/satellite-land-cover?tab=overview

Video materials

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2018/01/Changing_lands

Summary

The EOSTAT project aims at supporting the uptake of the Sen2Agri and Sen4Stat systems by FAO partner countries in the framework of the establishment of an Earth Observations assisted national crop monitoring system for production of official national agricultural Statistics on crop acreage and yield.

Project description

In line with the Agenda 2030 and the data revolution underpinning the SDG process, FAO is supporting countries in the use of geospatial data and methods as alternative and cost-effective ways to generate data related to the SDG and estimate essential agricultural variables, such as crop acreages and crop yields which can be indirectly measured through Earth Observations and in-situ data.

National Statistical Services frequently face limited resources to collect, analyze and disseminate agricultural statistics on regular basis. Earth Observations, and big data in general, come in the picture as an ideal solution and opportunity for NSOs to fill this gap and strengthen their capacity to timely generate crop statistics at national and subnational level, and feeding this to the SDG indicators. However, Earth Observation data do not come without challenges: they are a special category of Big Data and as such their access, storage, pre-processing and analysis is very demanding and is very much limiting their uptake by countries.

In order to break such technical barriers, FAO established a collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) as of 2014 to develop open-source user-friendly solutions (starting with the Sen2Agri toolbox, and now with Sen4Stat) to generate national crop maps and estimate yield for the main crops.

The EOSTAT project is supporting the uptake of these tools in 10 partner countries (Angola, Mali, Ethiopia, Rwanda, El Salvador, Senegal, Uganda, Tajikistan, Sri Lanka and Timor Est) in order to better assist NSOs addressing the increasing demand of agricultural statistics and the SDG reporting. Activities combine tools demonstration and capacity building.

Keywords, main expertise

Earth Observation, agriculture monitoring, agriculture statistics, acreage and yield, SDG’s, open source, capacity building

Funding bodies

Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Dr. Sophie Bontemps, Boris Nörgaard

Link to existing Webpage(s)

https://www.fao.org/in-action/eostat

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/3004c4ffd8fa4d11870863106b024d6b

Link to video materials

https://www.fao.org/statistics/events/events-detail/FAO-Webinar-Series-Earth-observation-data-for-agricultural-statistics/en

Summary

Lifewatch is the European Research Infrastructure Consortium for biodiversity and ecosystem research.

Lifewatch Wallonia-Brussels is a remote sensing data provider for ecosystem monitoring. Large scale (airborne optical and LiDAR) data is integrated into 2 m resolution geographic object database iteratively tuned for the modelling of species habitats and biotope characterization in Belgium. The same concept is applied at European level based on Sentinel-2 data (at 10 m resolution)

Keywords, main expertise

Biodiversity; ecosystem monitoring; species habitats; biotope; remote sensing

Funding bodies

European Union via Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Dr. Julien Radoux, Dr. Mathilde De Vroey, Dr. Thomas De Maet, Benjamin Goffart

External partners

ULg-Gembloux Agrobiotech

Link to existing Webpage(s)

https://maps.elie.ucl.ac.be/lifewatch/ecotopes.html?lang=en

Summary

Agroecosystems in Europe need an agroecological transition to ensure sustainable food production, resilience to climate change, biodiversity, and soil restoration. The EU-funded PHENET project will bring together the European Research Infrastructures on plant phenotyping (EMPHASIS), ecosystems experimentation (AnaEE), long-term observation (eLTER), and data management and bioinformatics (ELIXIR) to co-develop new tools and methods for the identification of future-proofed combinations of species, genotypes, and management practices. The project will deliver services enabling access to enlarged sources of in situ phenotypic and environmental data thanks to new AI-based multi-trait and multi sensor devices, unleashed access to high-resolution Earth observation data, FAIR data support, and a new generation of predictive modelling AI and digital twins solutions.

Extended project description

Objectives :

Europe urgently needs to find pathways towards agroecological transition of agroecosystems in support to food security, climate change resilience, biodiversity and soil carbon stocks restoration. In PHENET, the European Research Infrastructures (RI) on plant phenotyping (EMPHASIS), ecosystems experimentation (AnaEE), long-term observation (eLTER) and data management and bioinformatics (ELIXIR) will join their forces to co-develop, with a diversity of innovative companies, new tools and methods - meant to contribute to new RI services - for the identification of future-proofed combinations of species, genotypes and management practices in front of the most likely climatic scenarios across Europe. Ambitioning to go beyond current highly instrumented but often spatially and temporally limited RI installations, PHENET derived services will allow wide access to enlarged sources of in-situ phenotypic and environmental data thanks to (i) new AI-based multi (agroecology-related) traits multi-sensors devices (ii) to unleashed access to high resolution Earth Observation data connected to ground based data, (iii) FAIR data support for connection with (iv) new generation of predictive modeling solutions encompassing AI and digital twins. Developments will be challenged by and implemented in a series of eight Use Cases covering a large range of agroecosystems but also of ecosystems to demonstrate portability of solutions. Several of these Use Cases will mobilize on-farm data. A large effort will be devoted to training RI staff and beyond through a sustained collection of training material fed by experts. Outreaching activities will aim at enlarging the range of RI users. PHENET will not only strengthen RI but will also have major impact on the development of innovative companies on phenotyping, envirotyping and precision agriculture as well as on the emergence of climate smart crop varieties and innovative practices fitted to climate change and agroecological transition.

Keywords, main expertise

Phenotyping, Envirotyping, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Models, Earth Observation, Internet of Things, Agroecology, Climate change

Funding bodies

European Union (Horizon Europe 1.3)

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Xavier Draye, Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Tom Kenda

External partners

INRAE (coordinator), UCLouvain, Geosys, Julich, CNRS, Wageningen RU, University Angers, ETH Zurich, Cirad, Uppsala University, and many others.

Link to existing Webpage(s)

https://www.phenet.eu/en

Link to video materials

https://youtu.be/Ygq6rOWuDbs?si=3rLdThTWXvFvM5XU

Summary

Launched in 2013 and completed in 2020, Belgium's Proba-V satellite mission is leaving behind a valuable archive of weekly images with a spatial resolution of 100m. This archive allows for detailed observation of Earth and meticulous monitoring of vegetation, making it an invaluable resource. The Proba-V Land Use @100m project aims to advance research and development in mapping and detecting variations in land cover and land use, commonly referred to as Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC).

Keywords, main expertise

Proba-V, Land Use, Land Cover, Change Detection, Land Use Land Cover Change

Funding bodies

European Space Agency (ESA)

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Audric Bos, Céline Lamarche, Thomas De Maet, Quentin Marissiaux

Summary

The goal of the project is to develop a system for high resolution mapping soil organic carbon (SOC) at the field scale covering the entire Walloon territory. This will require identifying confounding elements to optimize image selection and researching suitable modelling approaches for the Walloon context. Specific challenges are the effect of soil moisture and soil structure on the spectral signal, representing uncertainty in the final maps and the low variability in SOC values in the Loamy soils which cover most of Walloon croplands.

Keywords, main expertise

Soil organic carbon (SOC), Sentinel-2, conservation agriculture, soil health, machine learning

Funding bodies

Walloon Government

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Bas van Wesemael, Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Dries De Bièvre

External partners

CRA-W, ISSeP, ULiège

Summary

RIOFAC's objective is to support the operationalization of the Central Africa Forest Observatory (OFAC) by implementing activities designed to consolidate decision-making tools for the region's political leaders and forest ecosystem managers in Central Africa.

The second phase of the project (RIOFAC 2) in 2021 aims to preserve Central Africa’s Forest ecosystems so that they can contribute to the well-being of the people who depend on them and of humanity as a whole, through sustainable management based on credible and regularly updated information.

Extended project description

The RIOFAC project aims to strengthen OFAC's action by contributing to the satisfaction of the following three needs:

To provide decision-makers with a system for collecting, validating, and managing data intrinsic to the forest-environment sector, as well as data from other sectors insofar as these are linked to the management of forest ecosystems and are likely to have an impact on them.

To publish information and analyses of interest for decision-making by governments and other direct or indirect stakeholders in the management of Central African forest ecosystems, as well as making data available via an electronic platform that enables interested parties to carry out tailor-made analyses to meet their specific needs.

To increase the effectiveness of OFAC through an established presence within COMIFAC, in a progressive and realistic manner in application of the various decisions of the COMIFAC Council of Ministers.

Reference: CIFOR, RIOFAC brochure (https://www.cifor-icraf.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2023/05/RIOFAC_Brochure.pdf)

Keywords, main expertise

Central Africa, Forest, COMIFAC, OFAC

Funding bodies

European Union

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Thibauld Collet, Juliette Dalimier

External partners

CIFOR, CIRAD, FRM, OFAC, COMIFAC

Link to existing Webpage(s)

OFAC website

CIFOR/RIOFAC website

RIOFAC brochure

Link to video materials

The power of data in protecting Central Africa’s biodiversity

Summary

The Sentinel-2 for Agriculture project aimed at providing to the international user community validated algorithms and best practices to produce EO products for agriculture monitoring preparing for the exploitation of Sentinel-2 observations. The project responds and contributes directly to the GEOGLAM initiative.

Extended project description

The Sentinel-2 for Agriculture project developed the open source Sen2Agri system that enables to ingest and process automatically Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 time series in a seamless way to derive four basic products for agriculture monitoring, identified as a priority by a large user community including the GEOGLAM one: monthly multispectral cloud-free composite, up-to-date cropland mask, mid-season and end-of-season crop type maps, and vegetation status indicator as NDVI and LAI time series. The system was demonstrated in 2016-2017 over three entire countries (Ukraine, Mali, South Africa) and eight local sites distributed across the world. This demonstration allowed very fruitful collaborations with local partners to collect in situ data in a timely manner allowing the production and validation of the Sen2Agri products over all sites. The Sen2Agri system has been uptaken by a large users’ community (more than 2000 system downloads around the world).

Keywords, main expertise

Agriculture monitoring, Sentinel-2, open source, GEOGLAM

Funding bodies

European Space Agency (ESA)

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Dr. Sophie Bontemps, Nicolas Bellemans, Philippe Malcorps

External partners

CS Romania (Romania), CESBIO (France), CS France (France)

Link to existing Webpage(s)

http://due.esrin.esa.int/page_project159.php

https://forum.esa-sen2agri.org/

https://github.com/Sen2Agri/Sen2Agri-System

Summary

The Sentinels for Common Agricultural Policy project provided the European and national stakeholders of the CAP with validated algorithms, products, workflows and best practices for agriculture monitoring relevant for the management of the CAP. The project paid particular attention to provide evidence how Sentinel-derived information could support the modernization and simplification of the CAP in the post 2020 timeframe.

Extended project description

The Sentinels for Common Agricultural Policy project developed the open-source Sen4CAP system, which is object-based and derives relevant markers and maps from the Sentinel 1 and 2 missions for 8 priority use cases defined in the context of the 2020+ EU Common Agriculture Policy reform: crop type mapping, grassland mowing, EFA practices monitoring, vegetation growing monitoring, tillage detection, parcel heterogeneity detection, bare soil period monitoring and land cover change between years.

The system was validated through full national-scale national demonstration in near real time for 10+ EU countries selected by DG-Agri and JRC. This demonstration was the opportunity to interact closely with Paying Agencies from the pilot countries in order to validate and assess the fitness-to-use of the generated products. Relevant training and capacity building activities were conducted during almost 2 years.

Release of the version 1 of the Sen4CAP system in November 2019. Continuous user support to expand the user community and to make the system evolving according to their needs (with ESA supervision).

The Sen4CAP system was adopted by several countries, as a building block for their own monitoring system. In particular, UCLouvain had the opportunity to train Luxembourg Ministry of Agriculture on Sen4CAP in a specific “LEO4CAP” project, during 2 years.

The Sen4CAP system was also adopted by private companies who build monitoring systems proposed to countries as a service. Sen4CAP is included in the EO-WIDGET portfolio, thanks to the support of the UCLouvain team.

Keywords, main expertise

Common Agriculture Policy, open source toolbox, Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, sustainable agriculture

Funding bodies

European Space Agency (ESA)

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Dr. Sophie Bontemps, Philippe Malcorps, Diane Heymans, Maxime Troiani

External partners

CS Romania (Romania), e-GEOS (Italy), GISAT (Czech Republic), Sinergise (Slovenia)

Link to existing Webpage(s)

http://esa-sen4cap.org/

Link to video materials

http://esa-sen4cap.org/content/sen4cap-videos

http://esa-sen4cap.org/content/presentations

Summary

The Sentinels for Agricultural Statistics project aimed at paving the way for an advanced exploitation of the Sentinel missions to fit the workflow of the National Statistics Office in support of their national reporting and their SDGs international reporting.

Extended project description

The Sentinels for Agricultural Statistics project is developing the open-source Sen4Stat system, which generates a set of Earth Observation agriculture product, using Sentinel 1 and 2 missions, and couples them with the official agricultural surveys to get improved acreage and production estimates. The project is targeting statistics improvement through 6 use cases: cost-efficiency for acreage and production estimates, spatial disaggregation, timeliness, sampling design, survey data quality control and SDG reporting.

The first version of the system has been delivered in 2023. It is being demonstrated through national and regional pilot studies in 5+ countries, in close collaboration with the FAO and World Bank. This demonstration shows the added-value and the necessity to have close interactions with National Statistical Offices to ensure the compatibility and complementarity between their practices and the use of Earth Observation data.

Relevant training and capacity building activities is conducting and planned for the next 18 months. Continuous user support to expand the user community and to make the system evolving according to their needs (with ESA and FAO supervision).

Keywords, main expertise

Agricultural statistics, Earth Observation, agricultural survey, open source

Funding bodies

European Space Agency (ESA)

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Dr. Sophie Bontemps, Nicolas Deffense, Boris Nörgaard, Quentin Deffense, Pierre Houdmont

External partners

CS Romania (Romania), CLS (France), Universidad Polytecnica de Madrid (Spain)

Link to existing Webpage(s)

https://www.esa-sen4stat.org/

Link to video materials

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQXtWowwkAs

Summary

The objectives of the SPAGHYTI project is to develop services for the agricultural sector in the form of applications that provide farmers with relevant and actionable information at the parcel level. These will be powered by hyperspectral satellite imagery, providing access to very high value-added information at marginal cost.

Keywords, main expertise

Hyperspectral satellite data, precision farming, nitrogen, wheat

Funding bodies

Région Wallonne

UCLouvain promotor(s)

Prof Pierre Defourny

UCLouvain researcher(s)

Maxime Troiani

External partners

CRA-W, AMOS, Deltatec, ConstellR

The project of building a nanosatellite has been the main idea to join forces and knowledge in the Louvain4Space. The goal of this project is not only scientific but also pedagogic along its way. Thales Alenia Space Charleroi is our industrial partner and UCLouvain also works with engineers and scientists from the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB) and the Space aeronomy institute (BISA).

Nanosatellite name has been chosen via vote: LUNA for Louvain University NAnosat.

The first step has been to consider some Master thesis as part of our future nanosatellite project. The master (and PhD) thesis subjects list encompasses all subsystems of a nanosatellite as well as its scientific instrumentation and mission conception and analysis.

The nanosatellite subsystems and its possible payload as well as links to the subjects promoters are reported here after: