Today is the final day of the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society’s (RSPSoc) annual Wavelength Conference for students and early career professionals in remote sensing and photogrammetry. This year, Pixalytics was one of the sponsors of the conference, which was well attended by students from many international and UK universities, as well as representatives from a number of commercial remote sensing service providers and consultancies.
Over the three day event, keynote speakers and student poster presentations served to illustrate the infinite number of possible applications for remote sensing. One really interesting application was presented Emily Norton, a PhD student at Bournemouth University. She is an experienced forensic anthropologist with the inforce Foundation, which is a charity focussed on providing the forensic expertise for the scientific detection, recovery and identification of victims arising from mass fatality incidents, genocide, war crimes and similar crimes against humanity. Emily has previously worked in Rwanda investigating reports of mass graves following the 1994 genocide. Usually forensic work is intelligence led, but local reports are often imprecise and spatial data is needed to pinpoint graves. Once graves are located, forensic investigation is used to support war crime tribunals and, most importantly, return remains to families for proper burial.
Following the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2001 in the UK, thousands of livestock animals were destroyed and buried at sites across the country. Emily has used Landsat imagery of these animal graves as a basis to study the changes in vegetation at each site; the research she’s done means these principles could be used to detect clandestine mass graves in areas of conflict. Emily won the best poster competition at this year’s conference, and will travel to Bosnia later this year to test the remote sensing method further and begin to develop a streamlined standardised approach which can be used in developing countries to support future humanitarian efforts. With global coverage, a historical archive and the ability to be used safely in remote or high risk areas; remote sensing could be a valuable tool in this area of work.
One of the consistent themes of this year’s conference is that advances in technology mean that remote sensing equipment is becoming smaller, lighter, cheaper and more accurate, enabling a wider variety of remote sensing data to be collected. One of the most interesting features of the earth observation community is that each advance in technology drives new areas of research which, in turn, uncover new uses for remote sensing data, which then demands new technology! Hopefully, ESA’s Sentinel satellites will continue this cycle and inspire a new generation of remote sensing scientists; here’s to Wavelength 2015!
Blog by Bryony Hanlon, work placement student at Pixalytics Ltd and an attendee at Wavelength 2014.