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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:00] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to In-Orbit. It's a podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world. Brought to you by the Satellite Applications Catapult. I'm your host, Dallas Campbell, and in this series we'll be in conversation with some of the finest minds in the country, exploring all the ways that the UK is using space to make huge differences to our everyday lives, as well as gaining a better understanding of its role in shaping and sustaining our planet for the future.
In today's episode, we will be exploring sustainable land use and how can we balance the needs of local communities, businesses, ecosystems, to ensure that our land is used in a way that benefits everyone. I'm joined in the studio by Christian Rossi. He's the Geospatial Science Lead here at the Satellite Applications Catapult and remotely by Tim Hopkins, founder of Land App, and by Donna Lindsey. She's the strategic market, lead of environment and sustainability. At Ordinance Survey, the population of the UK is projected to increase by 3.2% inside the next decade from an estimated 67.1 million in mid 2020 to 69.2 million in mid 2030, we are growing into a finite amount of land that needs to support the future of our species and our planet from growing our food and nurturing our biodiversity to providing foundations for our homes.
So how do we adopt sustainable land use practices? How do we improve the wellbeing of local communities, and how do we protect the environment for future generations? The answer lies in technology and collaboration. Welcome, Tim, Donna, Christian, it's lovely to have you. We're gonna talk a little bit about sustainable land use, if that's okay.
So Tim, first Land Up, I've had a little scoot around the Land Up website. It's terrific and beautifully done. But tell us what it is and why it's important.
[00:02:19] Tim Hopkins: Yeah. Okay, great. I guess a bit of background story, which is all very relevant. So I actually am on our 90 acre family farm, just south of Guilford in Surrey. I am 40, fourth generation on the farm, and it was becoming obvious to me when I was about 18 that the probability of us being able to keep the farm if we didn't do something interesting was unlikely and as I started to try and work out what we were gonna do on the farm, I found the concept of permaculture and regenerative agriculture about 12 or 13 years ago.
[00:02:51] Dallas Campbell: Oh, what was the first, what culture?
[00:02:54] Tim Hopkins: Permaculture. Yeah, so it means permanent culture. So it's how do you design land use systems to go on in perpetuity. Kind of the antithesis to let's cut all the forest down.
So it's about smart land use decisions. So being brought up on the farm, I thought that'd be practical to apply, that those ideas would be practical to apply to the farm. So studied this, tried to apply that logic to the farm and found it was unbelievably difficult. I was lucky enough at that sort of time to travel around the world a couple of times and realized how unfortunately people were managing land everywhere in the world, were very good at destroying stuff, not so good at putting it back, and I was perplexed that there was no tool to support land managers to make smart land use decisions, and so that was where Land Up came from. The idea of how can we en mass support people to be funded to make good decisions through a digital mean.
And so that's where Land App came from, and that's the core thesis that we stand on. And the objective is to transition land use to best practice.
[00:03:53] Dallas Campbell: it. Just very briefly, Tim, I'm a farmer. What am I gonna do with the app? I press it, then what happens? Just quickly.
[00:04:01] Tim Hopkins: so you come in if you're a farmer, you've got a nine digit code called an SBI number, single business identifier. You type that into the land app and you get a digital twin of your farm. So basically type in that number Dallas, and then you get digital twin of your farm. So you get digital copy of your farm.
So it takes the data from the RPA prompts it on your Land Up map, and from there you can see all the information about your holding. So all the designations, you intersect the opportunities available, the funding opportunities available. So we just do all of that, as soon as you come in and create that digital twin, and then if you feel inclined, you can then click another couple of buttons and you can pull in all the Ordinance Survey master map data, so you get an even better view of your farm.
[00:04:41] Dallas Campbell: We're gonna talk a little bit about digital twins. I talk a lot about digital twins. It's one of these things that come, ideas that comes up again and again. So I don't want to, we, I think we understand what a digital twin is. Amazing, and so you can bring in ordinance survey stuff as well and really understand what your land is doing and where it's going and what opportunities are out there.
[00:05:00] Tim Hopkins: umexactly right, and we've done a couple of other things where you can then take that data, click another button, and it pushes all that data against satellite data and returns back. When did you last plow the field? Is it arable or is it grass? And we've got click another button and it shows you all of the interventions you could make on your farm. So where you should put pollinator mixes, woodland, wetland, wet grass. So once you've got that digital twin, you can learn a lot about it and that's basically it.
[00:05:25] Dallas Campbell: Amazing, amazing. If only we had someone from the Ordinance Survey here who we could in at this point.
[00:05:29] Donna Lyndsey: What a surprise!
[00:05:30] Dallas Campbell: Hey. Donna tell us,
[00:05:31] Donna Lyndsey: Hey,
[00:05:32] Dallas Campbell: You've got a big job title, strategic market lead environment and sustainability at Ordinance Survey. So everyone's heard of ordinance survey of course, but what do you do there?
What's your role encompass day-to-day?
[00:05:46] Donna Lyndsey: So my core role, and I guess my core mission is to really make sure we can utilize the core skill sets ordinance, because what we do actually umto provide people with a very simplified view of a very complex world. Okay, so what we are trying to do is really see how we can use those core skill sets where we can map out the landscape and tell people what's there into core insights to help them deal with some of these sustainability challenges. Because we are facing some huge challenges coming down the line. We've got seven years left to try and address some of these core issues around climate. So how can we, as Ordinance Survey really understand what we should be doing to support our core customers within that space?
So that's what I do. So I look at what we are doing now. I look at what we should be doing with our customers. I look at those emergent markets. I look at things like what Tim's doing and seeing how we can pivot and our core skills to really support these areas, and one of my core passions and missions really is one of the reasons why I came into Ordinance Survey is really to see how we can bridge the worlds between Earth Observation Data and Geospatial Data.
Because the two don't talk together terribly well. We have a load of wonderful science within the space community that really needs to be out in the hands of our end users. So we are looking at how we as ordinance survey can really help facilitate that and how we can help coordinate things not just in the UK basis, but on a global scale too.
[00:07:02] Dallas Campbell: Great. Thank you very much. Christian's in the room with me. I want to talk about this idea of sustainable land use and what we umobviously things like climate we understand, but what are the big challenges that we are facing? Because one thing I've noticed about planet Earth is that it's not getting any bigger. It's remaining the same size, and that in itself is problematic for growing populations
[00:07:25] Christian Rossi: Yeah, no, absolutely. There's so many things such as, desertification, which is a growing trend in some regions of the world or land degradation. It's another thing that is happening in some patches and as a scientist myself, in in remote sensing order observation, we can actually look from above.
We're talking of 600 kilometers above the earth and looking down and seeing how those trends, that's a good term. So how the, what is the evolution umour landing time and how is degrading or is improving? There is also an improve. So as human, we try to improve our lives sometimes for, with our forestation, for example, right? And so seeing this is feasible and this is what I am, what I'm researching.
[00:08:18] Dallas Campbell: So desertification, we don't have that problem in the uk, but certainly globally that's a big problem. I'm just saying in the UK specifically as a farmer, what are the big things? You talked about growing up on a farm and the problems of the future being that we face, like what are the, what were the problems that, that it motivated you to start this project?
[00:08:40] Tim Hopkins: I think the biggest thing, honestly is cashflow for farmers. So on a farm, if you do amazing sustainability stuff, you very rarely can actually sell your products, with a premium price on them, unless you've got a very good brand that you've built up as well. And most farmers aren't brand builders, they just sell products.
So at the moment, one of the biggest problems is that when you sell your products into the market, you don't get a premium on having done good stuff. So if you've protected the river systems from agrichemicals, if you've connected the ecosystems through your farm together, you don't make any money from that and so you have this problem, you've got a bit of a race to the bottom because all the farms are competing. They're trying to lower their costs because they don't get paid a premium. So the problem that we have, the biggest problem is farmers are not fairly remunerated for the services of their current assets.
So if you are doing great stuff that the water company fundamentally gets a benefit from, you're protecting the river system really well. The water company doesn't give you any money for that. If you are connecting all of your ecosystems together, the food retailer doesn't give you any money for that.
So farmers, or land managers generally are very rarely remunerated properly for the good stuff that they do, and the problem with that, it causes them to do bad stuff because they don't fundamentally lose out from doing that. So there's a lack of transparency in the value chain, that means that fair remuneration is not transacted. That's the biggest problem for farmers.
[00:10:06] Dallas Campbell: That's interesting. Donna, well Donna and Tim really, can you tell us a little bit? how the sort of connection between earth observation and satellite data, how that can change things, how that can help us be more sustainable with land use and, I don't know, Donna, maybe got you'll have some good examples.
[00:10:26] Donna Lyndsey: Yeah. yeah. No. I've got a couple of great examples actually. So it's really interesting the point that Tim's making about that visibility and transparency between, what a company thinks they're buying and actually what they're doing. So one of the things we're looking umthe moment is on a global basis. So we've got this thing called the Supply Chain Data partnership, which is a global partnership between ourselves, Unilever, Deloitte, Esri, and Planet, and the Stockholm Environment Institute, and we're exploring how we can actually embed transparency back into supply chain. So we're using satellite data to enable us to do the observation and monitoring and identification of these core assets within the commodity supply chain.
[00:11:03] Dallas Campbell: When you say core assets, what? What do you mean by core assets?
[00:11:06] Donna Lyndsey: So these are things like ummills, your farms, these key things that, that people, so say for example, Unilever through their procurement and buying process, they would obtain soy beans from a specific location. But the problem is that because they don't really know where those locations are, they then can't then mobilize the monitoring that we can do from space.
So we need to be able to identify these things accurately, and that's where location comes into play. So this is where we are playing a key role within this global supply chain to understand where these things are actually located on the planet. It's like putting a pin in the map, and then once we've done that, we can then enable any form of monitoring capability to be applied and this is satellite data because satellites are fantastic. We've got thousands of these things flying around the planet every day, doing wonderful monitoring stuff through all different parts of the spectrum that we can and cannot see. But actually, unless it knows what it's monitoring, it can't actually tell you, if things are going in the right direction, you know who's responsible for it, et cetera, et cetera.
So that's where the power of the combination of geospatial data, so map data, and earth observation data can really bring to bear because the map data gives the context that is missing from the Earth Observation data and Earth Observation data can tell us where,
[00:12:18] Dallas Campbell: can you just make that distinction between the two? How are they different? The difference... what's the between map data...
[00:12:23] Donna Lyndsey: different because
[00:12:23] Dallas Campbell: And and Earth Observation?
[00:12:24] Donna Lyndsey: Yeah. So the map data will tell you the name of the location. It'll tell you what it is. It'll tell you what type of feature it is, et cetera. Whereas the earth observation data, it can tell you things like, I'm a forest, I'm a piece of land, et cetera. But I can actually tell you I'm a piece of land called.
Joe Boggs farm up the road. I'm this piece of road here. So actually, for people to actually really act with the data they need to understand the context. It's really hard for people to see. Otherwise, it's just like an abstract view of the world. ummight know if it, this fieldield is greener over here, or this, this tree has a potential issue, et cetera.
But actually, until you really know where it is, it's really hard to pin it all down and find those people who are the responsible actors for making it better. So that's where Tim's app is really powerful because the farmers actually put all the field names into the application. They know where all the things that they've got, the contextual information around the map as well as using these Earth Observation capabilities as well.
[00:13:23] Christian Rossi: Yeah umsatellite, we with that observation we derive what is called land cover. So what's actually in any part of the world do we have a forest, do we have urban areas? Do we have a crop? Which type of crop? But we cannot derive what is called land use. So how this is then use is which practices as Donna was mentioning, what is actually going on over there.
Cause we can have a picture of what is there, but not what is who owns the area. So Earth Observation is telling us the cover, and geospacial data maps or databases they have these other information so we can mix them and create a complete picture.
[00:14:03] Dallas Campbell: Oh, that's so the people who are using your app Tim, will be able, will put in data from the ground, and that will all feed into a bigger, more contextualized picture. Is that the...?
[00:14:13] Tim Hopkins: Yeah, so here on our farm, we have here all of our field boundaries. So that's usually like the land registry boundaries that we bring in. So that's my red line boundary. That's what I own. Then like I mentioned at the beginning, we bring in the RPA data, the OS data, and then we match that with the satellite data.
So all of a sudden me as the farm, on the farm, I can see, okay, that information saying, this is when I last plowed the field, and this is the crop, the beauty, or the bit that actually, Donna, we need to have a chat about this, but is if the satellite data says, oh, Tim, that looks like it's a wheat field, and I go, it's not actually a wheat field, it's a barley.
I can update that on my land app account, and that data could flow back into the engine that's suggesting what it thinks that the land use is. So it becomes a training data set to increase the quality of the predictions of the satellite data. So like we take the data becomes available to the farmer to interface with and they can do good stuff, and that, that's useful as a training data and the bit that I think, exciting to go next is then once I've got a concept of my land, my baseline, I as the farm want to design my future.
Oh my gosh. That piece of the farm is really not climate resilient. It's very dry. It stays very wet, and here are my designs as to what I'm gonna do to improve the quality of that land, and then the satellite data can track the change in the delivery of that project so it can monitor that I'm delivering maybe what I'm being funded to deliver by the water company, the government, the food retailer. So we also help farmers future design and then the earth observation data tracks that change over time.
[00:15:45] Donna Lyndsey: Yeah, I'd like to just come in briefly there on one, tim, I think that's really interesting because one of the projects that we are trying to run for with another UK partner is this absolute recognition that with machine learning it's only rubbish in, rubbish out. So how do we make sure we've got that expertly sourced information to create those training data models?
So we are looking at how we can retrain some of our surveyors to support some of that, that data collection activity, but also working with other experts in the field to, to create a national repository that enables the uploading of expertly sourced data packages and then also to offer that as a verification process as well going forward for machine learning models.
[00:16:24] Dallas Campbell: That's really interesting, Tim, just very quickly I don't wanna spend too much time on it because we did a whole episode about Digital Twins, and it's such a fascinating concept, but I know you, you've done work with Sainsbury's, haven't you and I'm just I'd just like you to just tell us a little bit about how that worked with, in relation to the digital twin idea.
[00:16:44] Tim Hopkins: Yeah. What's happened as a pressure that's in the market, there's a thing called the Task Force for Nature Related Financial Disclosures. So it's like a reporting framework that corporates need to use to disclose their impact in nature. So if you imagine your Sainsburys, they're all the farms that supply that you.
This reporting framework now requires you to start to disclose how you are interfacing with nature through your suppliers and, most food retailers don't have that granular data as to exactly which field did what food come from, and is that farm, accidentally polluting the river system because they've got no buffer strips next to the river.
So what Sainsbury's wanted, and some of the others that we're speaking to as well, is that digital transparency, of their supply chain allows them to aggregate that data. Track each of the farmers', quantity of biodiversity on the farm. So we can do the 30 by 30, so what's land sharing and what's land sparing for biodiversity on nature on the farm and then same for reason, others, they get the aggregate view in our natural capital dashboard. So they go across your entire portfolio. This is the percentage of land that's, in Wild flower meadows, in Woodland and this, that, and everything else and they can use that to report to their board. To their shareholders and customers and their regulators.
So Sainsburys can say, okay, actually do you know what? We do know our impact in nature. This is exactly what it is and as the farmer updates it on the land app, so that data updates in their dashboard, and so it can also go up to the regulators so they get like live transparency on their supply chain without having to really do anything 'Cause they're data consumers and the farmers data producers.
[00:18:19] Dallas Campbell: But the point being that this is a digital twin, so this is all done virtually rather than on the land. So you can...
[00:18:26] Tim Hopkins: correct.
[00:18:26] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. Got it. Got it.
[00:18:28] Tim Hopkins: And not paper.
[00:18:29] Dallas Campbell: Exactly. We should talk a little bit about data then in that case, not paper, but data. How easy is it donna to access all this data and umtalked about making, retraining people and making models. How easy is that getting access to all this data and getting people to understand it?
[00:18:49] Donna Lyndsey: It's hard, I think is the honest answer to that, Dallas, the Ordinance Survey has open data sets and it has a data hub and application interface feeds that people can access, openly online, et cetera. But where it starts becoming really difficult is when you start to pull in from these other sort of data information silos like the Earth Observation community.
So we did a test quite recently with the UK Space Agency, a space for climate, where we took some of the heat data that comes from Landsat satellites which is held by the National Center of Earth Observation and this data's been around for 30 years and we tested it with our customers, say this data has got a lot of intelligence around, the heat distribution of the city. Is it of use to you? Is it of interest and can you use it? And a lot of our customers, we've got over 5,000 customers and many of them declared climate emergencies. A) said, yeah, we'd like to use the data, but B) we have no idea how to interpret it and we have no idea how to access it. So we're exploring with these sort of centers of how we can actually pull the data across into formats that people can use, but also make sure that insight can be used with OS map data so that they can start answering some of these core questions in terms of, where do I need to put these interventions in place? What happens if I do this to this site over here? Does it make a change? It is really hard because these two worlds of Earth Observation and Geospatial data have grown up separately and we need to start bringing them together, and that's gonna be the challenge.
[00:20:15] Dallas Campbell: That's Christian, as from an education point of view, you're a lecturer, you're an academic. How easy is it to get people to understand this and embrace it and get it to move forward?
[00:20:26] Christian Rossi: Yeah umagree with Donna about the difficulties in, in getting data, in getting the right data. 'Cause data is not difficult to get per se. So there are like platforms where you can get
But...
[00:20:37] Dallas Campbell: but people know about it
[00:20:39] Christian Rossi: ...that's a point to understand which type of data do I need for my purposes.
[00:20:43] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:20:44] Christian Rossi: Do I need that now? Public data or do we need commercial data, which is just at higher resolution. And then once I have the data data is just data. I need to process this data to get this information. So we were talking about this fascinating land cover maps. How can I, which data do I need to use to figure out whether the tree that we see out from the window there is a pine tree or it's, I dunno, birch whatever. For that, we need to educate people in in understanding this. So you need this data, you need this processing, or you need this products. So these companies are giving you these products and mapping the landscape, right? So umsay data is there. Processing is there. We got AI, whatever, how to make the user understand which type of data, this is a role that companies such as the Catapault or the Ordnance Survey UK Space Agency we are here for that. So umneed to educate the users.
[00:21:44] Dallas Campbell: This is an open question for anyone, umthat challenging and from where you are standing or sitting, is that a challenge to get this information across to companies and...
[00:21:54] Donna Lyndsey: I think from, yeah, from my point of view, Dallas it's about making it simple for people. They don't wanna know the science necessarily. They don't wanna have to dig into all of the processing of it. They just want the answer to their question. So how can we make that as simple as possible? And that's some of the things we're exploring at the moment. Like you say with the Catapult with UK Space Agency.
[00:22:11] Dallas Campbell: You talk to people about space as a general topic. People in the street haven't heard of earth observation umGeospatial data.
[00:22:20] Donna Lyndsey: But they use it all the time.
[00:22:21] Dallas Campbell: But they use it the time. That's thing. ummaking, that connection is...
...yeah, I don't know.
Are we doing a good enough job? Educating, I suppose...
[00:22:29] Donna Lyndsey: No, I don't think we've, from my perspective, and I've been in this industry for a ridiculous amount of years, we talk, tend to talk technical to technical. It's the same as space. We talk space to space. What we're not very good at umthat interfacing with the general public and saying, actually this is what this means to you.
So people like Uber and people like that. When you're walking Google Maps, et cetera, this is using space all the time.The technology on your phone is using space all the time. People just don't realize that. So how do we make this into a way that people can, they don't have to understand the science, they just need to understand, how they're using these.
[00:23:03] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. And the power of the tools I suppose, as well.
[00:23:05] Donna Lyndsey: Yeah.
[00:23:06] Dallas Campbell: Can in terms of sustainability, it's such a broad topic, sustainability. I know it covers lots of different, lots of different things umtouched on is what we do in space. Is that gonna be the most helpful tool we have? Just maybe you could talk about the power of it perhaps and just how fundamental it is.
[00:23:22] Donna Lyndsey: umI I think none of this would've started without space. Personally. This is why we've got the whole environmental movement, isn't it? Because when they first look back at the earth from space, people...
[00:23:34] Dallas Campbell: It's that standing back the canvas, isn't it? We've always looked up, you can the further away from the canvas, the more clear it becomes.
[00:23:42] Christian Rossi: Yeah, but it's fundamental. So sustainability and and earth observation are so much linked.
[00:23:48] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:23:48] Christian Rossi: We can see umthe whole world. Actually there are some some projects like in east and other places that they're creating a digital twin of the whole Earth. Which is like how it's probably, it's more on, on the earth science.
So how winds are moving, how oceans umwarming, and we can't link all of these to sustainability issues, right? Atmospheric, atmosphere itself. So we can see the atmospheric level. Can we reach net zero by 2050? umwe understand that? Without observations, so with carbon accounting techniques and so on. So that's why this sort of data is really fundamental in, in tackling the challenges that we have right now.
[00:24:28] Dallas Campbell: Let's talk a little bit about collaboration. You all work in yeah, you all work in different bits of the industry, but do you all talk to each other and are people talking to each other enough do you think?
[00:24:40] Donna Lyndsey: It's a good question. I talk to people all the time and it's really interesting that, you keep on unpicking at other areas where they all need to be engaged. I think from, we do need to collaborate much more. Closely, I think in terms of, driving this sport because it is gonna hit us so fast, the climate change to know issues that we do have to collaborate. We don't have time for everybody to go off in their own little silos, in their own research projects. We need to work together to really drive these things forward, and that's one of the reasons why we've got this big sort of international piece going on with the supply chain data project. 'Cause we recognise that we've got to do these things at pace, we've got to do these things globally. But but yeah, we work together with the Satellite Applications Catapult, Tim is the next geo-vation startup. Which is an Ordinance Survey innovation hub. So we do collaborate on that sort of basis, but I think there's, there is room for so much more, particularly from a government led point of view.
[00:25:34] Dallas Campbell: I was about, I was, yeah, I was gonna touch on that. I was gonna ask about sort of governments, without being, too party political, are we doing enough, obviously we had the National Space Strategy that came out last year. Is that enough? Has that changed attitudes, do you think?
[00:25:49] Tim Hopkins: I think I'm definitely seeing is as the pressure mounts as Donna and Christian say, is there's much more openness to collaboration. I think that's a really nice thing. I think maybe previously it was, competition was the way of business and I think now it's collaboration is the way of business and we are definitely seeing that DEFRA or government generally are much more open-minded in terms of how they solve the problem. They change their orientation from, leave it to us, we'll work it out to, you know what, we don't know really what we're doing, can you guys share and can we do this together? And I think Covid really helped that. The fact that we all started to communicate so readily through Covid online, I think it's massively accelerated the collaborative relationship of a lot of companies and organizations. So I think we, there's a massive transition and I think the point that Christian was making in terms of desertification and the degradation of our natural ecosystems, it's only gonna be satellite data that highlights to us as people, on a heartfelt level what's happening and it I think that view draws people towards how do we solve this problem on mass because we're all in it together. So I think collaboration is now the way of the world, and I think that's how we're gonna solve these problems.
[00:27:02] Dallas Campbell: Gosh, that's really counterintuitive of the idea that Covid, which was all about keeping your distance from people actually in a strange way, brought people together and made think about communication and how we do that and. Maybe had the benefit of making us...
[00:27:18] Tim Hopkins: And how fragile we are.
[00:27:20] Dallas Campbell: Yes, exactly.
[00:27:22] Donna Lyndsey: I agree with Tim. I think actually the ironic thing about Covid is it, it did make us work more collaboratively, more smarter. So some of the stuff that we've been doing in the international space, I don't think we could have done it without Covid because we now all have the same tool sets to actually talk to each other on a regular basis.
Tim and I, we rarely meet face-to-face, but umtalk, on a fairly regular basis like this. It enables us to do a lot more, I think because we are more used to it.
[00:27:48] Dallas Campbell: Again, it's, it was the technology that we're talking about things like, communication platforms like Zoom and everything else are just amazing. Actually, I just wanna talk a little bit more about...
[00:27:58] Donna Lyndsey: Forced innovation.
[00:27:59] Dallas Campbell: Exactly. Wars and pandemics and that kind of stuff tends to force innovation which is, that's, that's a whole other subject. Let's just talk about technology. How good is the technology now? Maybe you give us a little overview about what your thoughts are on that and how good is it going to get? And then I want to talk a little bit about how AI and machine learning can help us even further.
[00:28:25] Christian Rossi: I think the technology that we have right now is in terms of remote sensing and observation is, it's pretty good. So we do have, as Donna was mentioning, thousands of satellites right now flying above us. So we can spot every point on earth, like instantly. So the technology is there. It's and it's improving. It's improving in terms of, for example, how fine we can see something. So this is also called resolution. So how...
[00:28:54] Dallas Campbell: Just, well just give for our listeners what's the kind of best resolution one can get now,
[00:28:59] Christian Rossi: Yeah, we can get, yeah, umcivil domain we can get up to around 20 centimeter. So that means that, I dunno, our table is two meters by a meter. So this is six pixels, right? So we can see my ideally this tower, right, from space, so from , 800 kilometers. So that's impressive, right?
So the technology is there and is improving and this is super good. That's why we are, we're having all these applications and umare able to do what we are doing that's amazing.
[00:29:38] Dallas Campbell: You mentioned civilians, so presumably the military have, can go even below Below that
[00:29:44] Christian Rossi: Yeah. Yeah. This is regulated in some countries like the US the use of civil versus military. So yeah, here we're covering civil civil missions.
[00:29:54] Dallas Campbell: As Donna said, of course, it looks across various bits of the spectrum, so it's not just the visible spectrum. Of course, we can learn so much more from other parts.
[00:30:01] Christian Rossi: Yeah, we can see you can see day and night. So there are different technologies here, like Google Maps. She was mention, Donna was mentioning using what is called Optical Earth Observations, visible spectrum and beyond. But we can use also the Microwave Domain and the Radar Domain, which is a, just a completely different technology that is able to penetrate to through clouds.
So we can see if, even if there is a cloud, we can see what's happening in there. And also it's solar independence, so we can see day and night. So those are the two main technologies, and they can deliver data with that precision. So 20 centimeter.
[00:30:42] Dallas Campbell: And what's the, is there a kind of an end goal? Is it like, okay, we want to get even more resolution, we want it to be in real time. What's the kind of ideal for you guys?
[00:30:54] Donna Lyndsey:
Really. It depends on what you wanna do, cause these things cost, right? So it depends on what you actually need to use it for, and unfortunately in places like the UK we are very cloudy. So one of the things we wanted to use the satellite data for was to see whether or not we could identify pollution from space and unfortunately, a lot of these pollution events like sewer outfall events happen when it's very cloudy. So you have to use a different blend of technologies, not just the optical parts of the satellites. You can use, IOTs, but also you can use the different sensors as well to start tracing these things through, and that's where your predictive models become in play as well, because you can't always see everything from the space that you want to see.
[00:31:30] Dallas Campbell: So we got this great technology. We get this wonderful data that allows us to make all kinds of predictions. It allows us to see change, it allows us to change our behavior. I'm interested in attitudes of land users to this, perhaps land users whereby sustainability hadn't been, a priority. What are the attitudes like? Are we seeing a kind of a big change? Is there a, a direction of travel that you are optimistic about?
[00:31:59] Tim Hopkins: Yeah I think what technology and data does, it connects dots that were probably disparate, it sheds light on what was otherwise a very opaque system. So all of a sudden it's actually easier for you to go. As an example of a project we're working on with a couple of the water companies is they're fed up of having to pay money to get agrochemicals and sediment out of the water, out of the drinking water.
But with satellite data, you can very easily go, okay, where are the farms through this priority catchment. That are plowing close to the river's edge or they haven't got a riparian buffer along the river edge, cause we are in a very fortunate position in land up. We've got, over 8 million hectares of land has been mapped on the software.
So we can very easily go, oh, an intervention should happen here, and it's highly probable that farmer's already been mapped on the land up. So we can just notify that farmer. Oh, by the way, did you know you actually could get access to £3000 a year if you just did this thing? And I think that's the bit that I'm excited about is like, Where it was really hard to connect dots tech and data is making it super easy and that means a digital, a conversation can happen and a transaction. Ideally the farm will get funded, which my point about farms not being fairly remunerated, it bridges that gap, it solves that problem and that's where you can like jump towards better and everyone benefits. So your question, Dallas, about the attitudes, I think farmers are excited about the prospects of actually participating in a system where, before they were very isolated from it. So tech and data is giving them a network and a conversation which fundamentally leads to cash income that helps them run their business.
[00:33:33] Dallas Campbell: And Donna, as you said before, the simpler the better, the more, presumably more people are going to be won over by this.
[00:33:43] Donna Lyndsey: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing we shouldn't forget is, of course farmers use position navigation and timing for a lot of the devices on the tractors and how to put, the fertilizer and stuff like that. So that again, really helps 'em use, space to really increase efficiencies and again, that technology tends to be hidden, farmers are actually really astute when it comes umtech, but but we shouldn't forget that is all part of the space community as well.
[00:34:05] Christian Rossi: Yeah, and some of these is also regulated. If a farmer is producing a specific product that needs a certain certification sometimes we got this certification more in other countries maybe, but where there is no deforestation, right? Happening in, in your farm, you're producing some cacao and you need to certify that your cacao is ethically good, right? Those are certification that needs some data to verify that farm or that field is sustainable. Is ethically behaving good from an environmental point of view, and that's why we have umhave this data, so as a user, so as a researcher also that provides this type of data, I really hope that our world will get better because this data will tell us what's going on, and and through the certification and other government laws, we will be able to apply this for a better world at the end. This is our purpose.
[00:35:13] Dallas Campbell: All three of you sound really optimistic. I'm just, I'm curious what are the big problems that we need to be working on now? What are the things that keep you awake at night or annoy you, or you worry about.
[00:35:25] Donna Lyndsey: Speed and scale.
[00:35:26] Dallas Campbell: Speed and scale?
[00:35:27] Donna Lyndsey: Are the things that worry me. Yeah. we've got a lot, loads and loads of projects not just in Ordnance Survey, but across everything, know, academia, various government departments, et cetera, et cetera. All doing bits of it. But actually we need to do all this. It comes back to that collaboration piece. We need to have this mentality whereby we think, actually, let's not just do it over in these little silos and pockets over here. Let's all work on it together and get it out there quickly, but at the scale we need to do it because nature doesn't stop at boundaries. I know we try and force it to. But, but climate's not gonna stop at boundaries and things like that. So we need to really work collaboratively as quickly as possible to try and address some of these core challenges, but get that understanding, like Tim says, get that visibility of what's going on, make sure people can act and respond and, make sure we, we have the sustainable place going forward.
[00:36:15] Dallas Campbell: And Tim as a longtime farmer, as someone who's grown up with this, who's seen this firsthand, are you optimistic about the future? Are you, do you look at what you are, what you're doing? Actually, actually we've, we can really solve this. We can fix this using this new tech and...
[00:36:31] Tim Hopkins: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think there is, it's a hundred percent guaranteed that the world is gonna be a better place in a very short space of time. I have absolutely no doubt about it cuz it's just, it's, we all care about it, right? Like we are humans. We live on this planet, we care about each other. It's gonna be good. There are hurdles to jump through. So I'm like a hundred percent certain that we're going to a better world. There's stuff we could get wrong and we might not, but if we're good people and we collaborate, we're open, we're gonna be fine. But the thing that I think is the most important piece, which Donna just actually touched on, is, we need delivery of stuff happening in the real world.
Otherwise it's all the same. So you need people to do stuff and people are kind and they are philanthropic and they will do stuff, but most land-based businesses are businesses and there's an opportunity cost in transition. So if we're gonna stop desertification and we're gonna, we need to make sure funding is becoming available to people who own land to do the right thing in the right place, and then nature tends to take control of it. Once you get the hydrological cycle working again, nature will do its thing, right? That doesn't cost humans money. It doesn't cost pound coins. Nature does it, but we need to set the conditions up so that nature can take control, hence permaculture and regenerative agriculture, those kind of systems thinking approaches. But we need to fund land managers to do the right thing in the right place. There's complexity I can get into, which is all about you need a digital baseline of what you have. You need a digital design of where you're gonna go. That could be an order, suggested intervention based on AI, and we're doing some of that stuff already. But then it's easy, and then if you get, if the farmer gets funded to do that, and they can be monitored to ensure they are delivering it so you don't get bad actors, outcome's inevitable, and that's good.
[00:38:09] Dallas Campbell: so financial incentives, visibility of data, which is what the technology gives us, and of course education, getting people to know that all this stuff exists and it's, there seems to be the order of the day.
[00:38:21] Christian Rossi: Yeah, completely agree.
[00:38:22] Donna Lyndsey: To Tim's point around we need the investment into the land and for the land owners. So we've been doing some projects with Natural England actually. In looking how we can do landscape scale restoration, and a lot of it umbased around, that visibility for the investor because there's so much greenwash going on that investors have lost confidence in actually nature-based restoration.
[00:38:42] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, just tell us what that means, what it is.
[00:38:44] Donna Lyndsey: Yeah. So essentially, so if you've got a piece of land it's very similar to what Tim's doing with the farming. So if you've got a large parcel of land that's degraded, like peatland for example, you need large scale investment to get that peatland back to a carbon sink. To make sure it's absorbing carbon back into the land essentially and locking it down.
But to do that, you need large scale investment. It is not, you're not talking, small fry here. So we've been looking at how we can do that at landscape scale to give, the investors the confidence in what they want to pay for. So we've been working with naturally to really understand, okay, how do you baseline a site like Tim saying, how do you know what's there now?
Okay, so that's what the baseline is. It's telling you what says. Now you can then do calculations about what happens if I restore this? What do I get to in terms of my carbon credits? And then you get the investor to buy into that. But you need to give them the visibility and the confidence of what they're investing in is going in the right direction. So it's all about this visibility, about that monitoring process, and you need to enable the investor to have the same view as the landowner and the restorer, because otherwise they have no confidence or no understanding of what's going on the site, and these things take a long time, they can be between 30 and 50 years of investments, so you've got to have the confidence that these things are happening. So that's some of the stuff that we've been working on.
[00:40:04] Dallas Campbell: Tim and Donna, thank you very much indeed for stopping by and chatting Christian as well. Thank you very much for being here. I feel optimistic and all three of you sound very optimistic about it. It's a, sustainability is a massive global issue that doesn't respect boundaries, but I, hopefully with the technology we have, we can certainly address it. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for your company to hear future episodes of In-Orbit, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and to find out more about how space is empowering Industries between episodes. You can visit the Catapult website or join them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.