Studies

Studies is the Earth observation study and map-production service of VisioTerra, a French scientific consultancy founded in 2004. It covers two kinds of work. Product evaluations help data producers, mainly space agencies, measure a product's quality against external references and its fitness for different applications: for ESA, VisioTerra assessed the heights of the SRTM, ASTER GDEM, ALOS World 3D and Copernicus DEMs against ICESat, ICESat-2 and GEDI LiDAR data, and for CNES it produced a gallery of SPOT-1 to SPOT-5 scenes. Thematic studies, commissioned by United Nations agencies and NGOs, establish a baseline or track land-cover change by producing maps at regular intervals, using a class nomenclature supplied by the client.

VisioTerra geocodes optical, radar, elevation and vector data from different satellites so that they superpose spatially and stay radiometrically consistent, then applies orthorectification, calibration, time-series processing and classical or machine-learning classification. Its most recent studies mix optical and radar data to improve classification quality. Deliverables are maps, statistics, reports and GIS projects.

Published cases include 20 years of land-cover change and clandestine mining detection in Bafwasende (DR Congo) from Landsat-7, Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 for Tropenbos International; Sentinel-2 vegetation-loss mapping after Hurricane Matthew and a strategic environmental assessment of San-Pedro port (Côte d'Ivoire) for UNEP; geological photo-interpretation maps of the Tindouf Basin for Beicip Franlab / Sonatrach; and tens of thousands of geocoded radar images processed to detect natural oil seeps for oil companies, including TOTAL. VisioTerra holds the EU Copernicus Academy label.