Gorse Fires - Basic Payments Scheme

I see from The Journal that satellite imagery is being used to identify gorse burning with an eye to docking farmers through the basic payment scheme. I can certainly see how they could use it to quickly find the burning gorse using both optical (look for the fires / thermal signatures) or SAR (look for changes in backscatter following the burning) but I do not see how they can prove it was intentional using satellite imagery. I'll be following that one and may see something that the SCSI Rural group would be interested in. Additionally, the COPERNICUS emergency management service doesn't seem to have been activated - so that means the hi-res imagery wont be available free of charge for the period.

Interventions

I notice the University ePrints system has our recent paper (published in Inventions) listed as having been published in Interventions. 

I'm not sure what they are trying to tell us.

Forest Fires

I cam e across a nice link posted over on the EO & RS in Ireland blog. NASA have a near-real time satellite mapping facility for forest fires and this is quite topical right now with the gorse fires in Galway after the recent unseasonal dry weather.

The satellite mapping has identified a number of hotspots around Ireland right now but when you look at the rest of the planet you start to see some countries experiencing hundreds of occurrences, such as Mexico, Guinea, India etc. Screengrab for the Congo below.

CIG2017

The Conference of Irish Geographers 2017 was very enjoyable. I made my way to UCC (who hosted) to present our Slick Mapping results at the inaugural EO session. The usual culprits from MScs in GIS and RS were there scattered throughout the crowd. The Irish Geography community really is a tight-knit one, everyone knows everyone else and the atmosphere reminded me very much of Survey Ireland and the Geomatics community. Looking forward to next year when it is being hosted by NUIM and well done everyone involved this year.