The eStation, an Earth Observation processing service in support to ecological monitoring

• Published in: Ecological informatics Vol. 18; pp. 162 - 170
• Main Authors: Clerici, M., Combal, B., Pekel, J.F., Dubois, G., van't Klooster, J., Skøien, J.O., Bartholomé, E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.11.2013; Elsevier
• Subjects: Animal, plant and microbial ecology; Applied ecology; Biological and medical sciences; Conservation, protection and management of environment and wildlife; Environmental indicators; Environmental monitoring; fires; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; General aspects; General aspects. Techniques; Internet; Methods and techniques (sampling, tagging, trapping, modelling...); moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer; oceans; Parks, reserves, wildlife conservation. Endangered species: population survey and restocking; Remote sensing; sustainable development; Teledetection and vegetation maps; terrestrial ecosystems; vegetation; Web services; Africa; Web services; Environmental monitoring; Remote sensing; Environmental indicators; Population survey; Indicator; Environmental protection
• ISSN: 1574-9541
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoinf.2013.08.004

The eStation is a collecting and processing system designed to automatically deal with the reception, processing, analysis and dissemination of key environmental parameters derived from remotely sensed data. Developed mainly at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the eStation has been distributed to 47 sub-Saharan countries in the frame of the AMESD (Africa n Monitoring of Environment for Sustainable Development) project to provide local institutions with the capacity to easily access a large range of remote sensing products on vegetation, precipitation, fires and oceans. These products, derived from the processing of images coming from various instruments including SPOT-Vegetation, MSG-SEVIRI and MODIS are developed to allow end-users to make local and regional assessments of the state of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. The products, dispatched to the users through the EUMETSAT data broadcasting system (EUMETCast) or provided by other Earth Observation (EO) data agencies (e.g. NASA), are further processed by the eStation to allow end-users to generate their own environmental, whether terrestrial or marine, assessments and reports. Initially designed as a stand-alone system using an open source development framework, the eStation has recently been further developed as a web processing service to allow a broader range of end-users to access the data and services over the Internet. It is the purpose of this paper to introduce the readers to the eStation and its products, to share the lessons learnt in deploying these services as well as to discuss its more recent use in chained environmental web based modeling services.