CEGIS Geoinformatics and Spatial Technology

The Center for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) is a public trust established by the Government of Bangladesh in 2002 under the Ministry of Water Resources. Its Geoinformatics and Spatial Technology service and Remote Sensing division combine satellite image analysis with GIS to produce land use and land cover maps, change detection, flood inundation and erosion-accretion maps, crop maps, digital elevation models, multi-hazard and vulnerability maps, and clutter data and 3D building models for telecommunication network planning.

CEGIS has used radar remote sensing for monsoon flood mapping since 1993, and mapped the 2017 flash flood and crop damage in the haor region from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery. It prepared the National Land Cover Map from 2015 SPOT imagery for the Forest Department, historical land cover datasets for 2000, 2005 and 2010 from Landsat, and land use maps for 46 districts for the Ministry of Land. In 2025 it presented an updated 2023 national land cover map and natural capital maps with the Forest Department under the SUFAL project.

Since 2004 CEGIS has issued annual one-year-ahead riverbank erosion predictions for the Jamuna, Ganges and Padma rivers from time-series satellite images, at 30%, 50% and 70% probability, with a stated overall accuracy of 70 to 80%. BRAC (2016 to 2018) and CARE Bangladesh (2020) passed the predictions on to riverbank communities.

Work is delivered as consultancy projects: maps, geospatial databases, reports and web GIS and decision-support systems. CEGIS states it is ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 certified.