Servicestelle Fernerkundung (Sat4Bund)

The Servicestelle Fernerkundung (Remote Sensing Service Point), offered as Sat4Bund, is the central service of the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) for supplying commercial satellite imagery to the German federal administration. Buying commercial very-high-resolution imagery normally takes budget, know-how and planning; the service advises on, bundles, procures and licenses it centrally, free of charge for federal bodies and institutional federal grant recipients. It has run since 2022 within BKG's Satellite-Based Crisis and Spatial Information Service (SKD).

Through framework contracts with data providers, eligible users can draw on archive imagery from more than 50 current and past missions: 36 very-high-resolution multispectral missions (down to 30 cm), 10 high-resolution multispectral missions and 8 SAR missions in X-, C- and L-band. The service also commissions new optical and radar acquisitions (tasking), digital terrain and surface models, cloud-free mosaics and special modes such as stereo, short video and night imagery. Sample products on BKG's page come from Pléiades, PlanetScope, TanDEM-X, GeoEye-1 and Jilin-1. Users can search and view imagery on two external web platforms, stream it as a web service (e.g. WMTS) into their own systems, and download licensed data, which is licensed once for shared use across federal bodies.

Alongside data supply, the service offers initial and expert consultation, feasibility analyses, demand coordination across agencies, and training and workshops. It handled 39 orders in 2022, 62 in 2023 and 48 in 2024; the 2024 orders came from 11 federal ministries' portfolios and included a series of 13 GHGSat methane acquisitions for the German Environment Agency (UBA).