Swift Geospatial will be providing Ecosia with the vital on-going and near real-time information they recognized was required. In order to ensure the promises to their users are being met, information (such as the survival and growth rate, as well as general health of the trees that are being planted) will be given on a monthly dashboard. Three meter resolution imagery will provide Ecosia with unbiased verification of their work; empowering them as this decision-support tool asserts the accountability and transparency of the goals they aim to achieve through their visionary work.
More information about Swift Geospatial’s role in this exciting partnership, as well as the services being provided, are detailed in Part 1: ‘Swift Geospatial partners with Ecosia for pro-active tree monitoring.’
Delving into the mechanics of the system Swift has tailored for Ecosia:
A customized platform:
With thousands of sites scattered across the globe, Swift Geospatial’s processing system will ingest the thousands of resultant polygons of Ecosia’s plantations with a custom unique system. This system will identify and download the best cloud-free satellite images (thanks to our partner, Planet) for analysis.
Since the plantations will be extended and more trees planted in the future, the processing system that Swift has tailor-made specifically for Ecosia is designed to be flexible and highly scalable.
Programming for an autonomous system
The Swift Geospatial team has developed a completely autonomous system. James Saunders, head of Research and Development for Swift elaborates: ‘With the advent of modern cloud systems and their processing opportunities, we were able to develop a cost-effective autonomous system that runs off-site, completely in the cloud. This brings numerous advantages to our data processing capabilities and, ultimately, those advantages are pushed to our clients.’
Thus, by working smart with specialized scripting and custom algorithms; we are able to save time, energy and money while the data is automatically processed.
Storage
In order to assimilate the enormous amount of resultant data that is captured, the Swift Geospatial R&D team has utilised a cloud-based storage system in order to safely store the high resolution imagery. This service is furthermore deployed within Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has been selected for the reliable, safe archiving of the valuable data.
Through our partnership with Esri inc., we have deployed Esri’s ArcGIS Enterprise servers located in Frankfurt, Germany; Oregon, U.S.A. as well as Cape Town, South Africa.
Our May 2020 blog post ‘Moving to AWS’ describes this platform in more detail. By taking advantage of cloud infrastructure, we have reduced the time taken to acquire data, process data and deliver results.
In addition, cloud-based processing means that the hardware utilised is always the latest, is maintained and has on-demand redundancy. Furthermore, cloud infrastructure offers inherent security and fall over protection, with a guarantee of 99.99% uptime.
- In January 2020, Swift Geospatial was promoted by the Esri startups program to the official Silver Tier Partnership. We are also the proud winner of the Analytics to Insights 2021 Award of the Esri Partner Conference. See our grateful announcement here.
Result: a customised front-end dashboard
The end product that Ecosia will be receiving is a unique live and customisable front-end dashboard.
Typically, our custom-designed dashboards enable our clients to convey information by presenting location-based analytics through interactive data visualizations on a single screen. The easy-to-read data is invaluable in order to assist informed decision-making, visualize trends and for monitoring the status-quo of a given project in real time.
Tailored for our unique client, Ecosia is thus granted the ability to slice their data to get the constantly-updated answers they need, and with immediate effect. Including stats, graphs, charts, maps and integrated apps, Ecosia has invested in a critical component to their research, business development and geospatial infrastructure – ultimately empowering them to give back even more.
Conclusion:
At Swift Geospatial, we pride ourselves on using the latest high-end technology in order to empower our clients with the individualized tools they need to improve the efficiency and impact of their visions. We believe that there is never a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Bettering one’s unique business model through the close monitoring of the status of one’s work is essential to identifying shortfalls, making better decisions and to be immediately alerted in times of emergency. This saves invaluable time, money and, most importantly, keeps our client’s clients happy through pro-active information.
Ultimately, we believe that the customised dashboard system we have engineered is a powerful tool to improve the efficiency of our Ecosia’s workflow and improve their operational workflow in a meaningful way.
For more insight into monitoring for accountability; check out our article ‘The C-Word’ over here.
