AMA's Contribution to CEOS:
Enabling Environmental Intelligence through Open Science
At AMA, we are passionate about understanding the Earth as a whole system. We are focused on improving the planet through the use of open technology, open solutions, and open science. This starts with getting smarter. That's where Environmental Intelligence comes into play. Environmental Intelligence is the integration of environmental and sustainability research with data science to provide meaningful insight into our changing planet and actionable information to support the end-user.
For over a decade, in partnership with NASA, AMA has been supporting the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) creating open tools, performing analysis, and building relationships in the international community. As one of five founding partners, AMA helped create the Open Data Cube (ODC) initiative to provide a data architecture solution that adds value to its global users and increases the impact of Earth Observation (EO) satellite data. We work with leading institutions and space agencies to harness the power of free and open satellite data, enabling open science and environmental intelligence.
The ODC is an open-source platform for managing satellite data. The objective of the ODC is to increase the impact of satellite data by providing an open and freely accessible exploitation tool, and to foster a community to develop, sustain, and grow the breadth and depth of applications. This solution intends to support key objectives, which include building the capacity of users to apply EO satellite data and to support global priority agendas, such as those found in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDG) and the Paris and Sendai Agreements.
AMA played a critical role in creating the African Regional Data Cube (ARDC). The ARDC was a partnership between the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development and Data (GPSDD), CEOS, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Government of Kenya, Strathmore University and the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). The ARDC suppported five countries: Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania. The ARDC was the precursor the Digital Earth Africa. AMA is proud to have supported Digital Earth Africa and other Open Data Cube deployments across the globe.
AMA’s team at ARDC Training Workshop
Ghana Illegal Mining detection using the Fractional Cover algorithm that classifies every pixel as a fraction of bare soil (RED), photosynthetic vegetation (GREEN) and non-photosynthetic vegetation (BLUE).
AMA’s team has played a vital role in the ODC initiative as a founding partner, along with NASA, the United States Geological Survey (USGS), Geoscience Australia (GA), Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), and the UK Catapult. There are over 50 countries either developing or considering using ODC at national-scale. Since ODC’s inception, the AMA team has been instrumental in supporting ODC by making significant progress in the advancement of open source software tools and algorithms that support the deployment and operation of data cubes on local or cloud computing systems around the world.
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