Environmental Monitoring: Finding Sustainable Solutions

MapAction is a company for identifying environmental problems and their causes. The company has developed an app that allows citizens to report situations such as polluted river water.
Using up-to-date metadata required for effective analysis with machine learning, they can constantly monitor the areas at risk.

OneAtlas

Forest and Environment

Mali

Back to Case Studies

Challenge

MapAction has created a successful business identifying environmental problems and their causes in its home city of Bamako, Mali. The firm built a smartphone app that enables citizens to report situations, such as polluted river water.

The West African firm uses Google Earth imagery and a drone to investigate each issue. Often the company finds a waste dump or agricultural activity upstream causing the pollution. MapAction has pinpointed many other threats to natural resources as well.

MapAction wishes to expand the speed, efficiency and geographic scope of its business beyond Mali, primarily with AI algorithms to identify land use/land cover features impacting local environments.

However, the Google Earth data lacks the timeliness and metadata information needed for effective analysis with Machine Learning. And the drone data, while accurate and timely, can’t be collected easily and affordably far from their HQ in Bamako.

Solution

As a participant in the Airbus OneAtlas Pitch Your Project competition, MapAction now has instant access to georeferenced, time-stamped Living Library imagery across Africa and around the world.
Living Library is an online portal that hosts fresh acquisitions of 50cm resolution Pléiades and 1.5m resolution SPOT satellite data filtered for quality. Pléiades and SPOT data in the portals have high levels of location accuracy and little cloud cover.

Identifying water pollution using satellite imagery

MapAction is creating Machine Learning algorithms to automatically identify waste dumps and other features / activities causing water pollution or threatening other natural resources.
MapAction is acknowledged in Mali as a leader in developing sustainable solutions to environmental issues. With global access to Living Library imagery, the firm will help clients in other nations reduce threats to natural resources.
MapAction is developing Machine Learning algorithms to automatically identify land use features in satellite imagery that might be the cause of environmental problems in areas outside

Benefits

Living Library gives Map Action global access to high-quality satellite imagery with metadata that will enable the Mali firm to expand its environmental monitoring business.

Organisations Involved

MapAction is a provider of geospatial analytics for environmental applications based in Bamako, Mali, in West Africa. MapAction’s clients include governments agencies and NGO’s such as the World Bank.

MapAction Website