Belgian Earth Observation Days 2013

Informations

The main goal of the Belgian Earth Observation Days is to make professionals and researchers concerned by remote sensing aware of the projects realized in Belgium in the framework of the STEREO II programme and to offer the possibility for networking.

STEREO II: Support to Exploitation and Research in Earth Observation

The STEREO II programme, launched in 2006, aims at putting Belgium on the map as a centre of expertise in a number of remote sensing areas and to establish the use of remote sensing as a common technique in the greatest possible number of research and application fields.

Apart from the scientific presentations of STEREO II projects this event is the opportunity to give a special focus on:

1. The Evaluation of the STEREO II programme

After 8 years and more than 70 projects financed it's now time to bring the programme to a close and launch its successor: STEREO III. In order to assess its merits, an evaluation of this programme is currently on-going. The main goals of this work are to:

• Obtain an overview of the performances of the different programme components;
• Investigate whether the initial objectives were reached;
• Formulate recommendations for the organisation and definition of the research priorities of STEREO III.

A presentation will be dedicated to this evaluation during the first day of the workshop.

2. The start of the new STEREO III programme (and launch of the first call)

The launch of a new STEREO phase has recently been approved. We are proud to officially announce the start of this new initiative designed to be the national earth observation programme until 2020. 
What are the novelties? Who can submit a proposal? How are the proposals evaluated? What is the schedule of the first call of proposal? We plan to answers all these questions during a presentation given by the programmes managers (also at your disposal during the two days of the workshop) during the morning of the first day.

3. Introduction to the use of UAVs for earth observation

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), colloquially known as a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot on board. Its flight is controlled either autonomously by computers in the vehicle or under the remote control of a pilot on the ground. This tool is now used in a lot of application fields, earth observation being one of them. A half day will be dedicated to UAV's with a special focus on: 

• complementarity with data from satellites;
• what about the legislation;
• examples of concrete applications.

A live demonstration by two different types of UAVs is also foreseen.