Eurosite’s rapidly growing Remote Sensing Support Group decided to change their meeting structure to allow for closer cooperation within the group and to improve the flow of ideas and experience between the remote sensing experts and practitioners. According to the new structure, discussed at the online meeting on 26 March, the group will meet every month, and at each meeting, the group members will present examples of the use of remote sensing in practical site management.

The last online meeting, aimed to test such a seminar approach, took place on 23 April. The basis for the discussion was set by Ioannis Manakos, Associate Researcher at CERTH Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, who presented on the topic “Hydroperiod estimation using Sentinel -2 and Sentinel -1 data”.

Leveraging on the wealth of information Copernicus Sentinels bring along, the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) developed methods for inundation regime monitoring to facilitate Park Managers’ decision making as part of the H2020 ECOPOTENTIAL flagship project. Starting from the prerequisite that existing personnel has no knowledge about the process of information generation, nor contribute with own data, CERTH realised unsupervised thresholding and machine learning services that were validated successfully in Doñana and Camarque Biosphere Reserves (1) (2) (3), and applied with similar success to other Natura 2000 sites across Europe (e.g. for the myEcosystem showcase of the E-shape H2020 project). Workflows are transformed in online data services for ECOPOTENTIAL, while they have been upgraded to stand alone to initiate processes with moderate computing capacity requirements within E-shape, as well.

During the seminar,  Ioannis Manakos presented the theory and applications to the Eurosite audience and discussed about benefits, challenges, limitations and outlook. More about the full extent of the work carried out in ECOPOTENTIAL can be found here, and about the research group here.

After Ioannis’ presentation, the Remote Sensing Support Group had an interesting discussion on possibilities of financing a similar project within the Horizon 2020 call, namely on the topic of “Environmental Intelligence”. Furthermore, the group discussed how they can cooperate with such research and innovation projects to ensure the optimal distribution and use of their results in site management and nature conservation practice.

The next meeting of RSSG will be held in June.

(1) Kordelas, G.A.; Manakos, I.; Aragonés, D.; Díaz-Delgado, R.; Bustamante, J. Fast and Automatic Data-Driven Thresholding for Inundation Mapping with Sentinel-2 Data. Remote Sensing 2018, 10, 910.
(2) Manakos, I.; Kordelas, G.A.; Marini, K. Fusion of Sentinel-1 data with Sentinel-2 products to overcome non-favourable atmospheric conditions for the delineation of inundation maps. European Journal of Remote Sensing 2019, 0, 1–14.
(3) Kordelas, G.; Manakos, I.;, Lefebvre G.; Poulin, B. Automatic Inundation Mapping Using Sentinel-2 Data Applicable to Both Camargue and Donana Biosphere Reserves, Remote Sensing 2019, 11, 2251.