I-Corps: Mining satellite data streams for commercial applications in natural resource monitoring

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Earth's human population has risen over seven-fold, from one to 7.3 billion people, in the last century and is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. While droughts, floods, and other climatological extremes are increasing in frequency and severity, human population growth and increasing affluence are exerting unprecedented demands on Earth's ecosystems for food, water, and other resources. Threats of volatility have resulted in a growing demand for timely, accurate monitoring of renewable natural resources. Similar to the development of weather satellites in the past, terrestrial-observing satellites are now capable of providing consistent, long-term records of past, current, and projected future resources. There are two principal markets for this information. Managers of crop, range, forest, and wild lands require timely geospatial monitoring of land condition in order to plan stocking, treatment, and harvest levels. Meanwhile, financial entities must monitor these same ecosystems in order to predict yields, set commodity prices and insurance premiums, and to price instruments such as catastrophe bonds. To do this, data analysts in financial (e.g., investment, insurance) and natural-resource management sectors currently rely on indirect or coarsely scaled information such as regional tables for their analyses. This I-Corps team has developed a technology to provide high-resolution monitoring from satellite data streams that will enable more responsive land management and will increase liquidity and efficiency in resource and rural land markets. When paired with desktop and mobile visualization tools, these data have the potential to give resource managers real-time access to the "pulse of the planet" at local, regional, and global scales. The three goals of this project are to: (1) validate the value proposition through customer discovery, (2) build a minimum viable product to demonstrate to potential partners and customers, and (3) conduct beta tests with early adopters. Based on these goals and the interviews to be conducted through the NSF I-Corps Teams program, this team will focus its efforts on specific resource (e.g., agriculture, forestry, urban development) and business (management, finance, insurance) sectors. The team will then refine its minimum viable product based on the results of these interviews and develop customer relationships. The team plans to have its first customer for geospatial data products. At the end of the I-Corps Teams program, this team will decide upon the commercial viability of products and services; and if deciding to move forward, the team will provide a transition plan to do so and a demonstration of the technology for potential partners.