Parks Canada has been using earth observation technologies for some time to monitor the widespread 41 national parks and national marine conservation areas in the country. A concerted effort has been made to assess ecosystem integrity and climate change in the parks, and there are ongoing efforts to extend this monitoring effort.
PCI Geomatics just won a contract valued at over $520,000 (CAD) through the Canadian Space Agency’s Earth Observation Applications Development Program (EOADP) to derive ecological indicators from RADARSAT-2 imagery. The project will assist Parks Canada in meeting its Ecological Integrity initiatives as mandated under the New Parks Act of 2002. The second objective is to develop methodologies, systems, and products for Parks Canada and Environment Canada to increase their utilization of RADARSAT-2 data.
This contract allows PCI to build an Image Management System to discover, load, submit, and track processing through an intuitive web based interface. Monitoring Canadian parks will be achieved through the repeat collection and processing of RADARSAT-2 imagery to extract information such as water extents, Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), as well as ice conditions. The project will also provide a new generation of software capabilities, leveraging recent advances in high-speed computing hardware for automating synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite image correction, storage, and information extraction in an ESRI ArcGIS-compatible format.
