[SatNews] Geoimage has announced that the firm has recently signed a distribution agreement with BlackBridge to market and sell RapidEye products throughout the world.

RapidEye is a unique satellite option and offers a five fives solution:

• 5 satellites
• 5 metre resolution
• 5 spectral bands
• Up to 5 million sq kms collected every day
• 5 billion sq kms in archive

The five-satellite RapidEye constellation offers enhanced earth observation capabilities to its customers. The combination of large area coverage, frequent revisit intervals, high-resolution and multispectral capabilities are unrivaled in the industry.

Environmental monitoring and mapping of deforestation and forest degradation has become quite a priority and with the RapidEye constellation, Geoimage are now able to offer clients a large area solution, especially over cloudy areas such as Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. The red edge band together with the broad area coverage and speedy capture time is ideal for assessing change detection of land based features, assessment of current land use, disaster response and reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

Deforestation in Indonesia has had a massive environmental impact on the country, which is home to some of the most biologically diverse forests in the world. It has been estimated that all the tropical rainforests in Indonesia would be logged out in another 10 years and that it annually loses around the same amount of forest as Brazil, despite being only a quarter of the size. Large areas of forest in Indonesia are being lost as native forest is cleared by large multi-national pulp companies and replaced by plantations. A similar story occurs in Papua New Guinea where an extensive amount of tropical forest is being lost annually. Deforestation in Papua New Guinea is mainly a result of illegal logging, which contributed to 70-90 percent of all timber exports.

These two RapidEye images reveal deforestation taking place in Paragominas between August of 2009 and August of 2012. Images courtesy of Geoimage.

RapidEye satellite data has also been used to enforce environmental law in Brazil. Through continual monitoring with RapidEye satellite data, the hope is that it will assist identify forest degradation, slow down illegal deforestation and in time, put an end to both in these countries.

Geoimage offers RapidEye imagery to clients from all industries but understands the advantages lie with environmental, agricultural and forestry applications where broad-scale imagery is vital to monitoring changes in these situations.

The Geoimage infosite is accessible via http://www.geoimage.com.au/