Satellite Applications Knowledge Exchange Fellowship

The Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) supports a wide variety of environmental research into the state and health of the planet on which we live. This research helps inform policy and decision making bodies in their response to environmental and climate issues. Through NERC funded work, significant expertise and data has been built up which could be re-exploited in commercial sectors.

The fellow aims to champion NERC science to the commercial service industry who are using satellite Earth Observation (EO) imagery to provide products and services in the domains of agriculture and land environment. To this end, the fellow will collaborate with the Satellite Applications Catapult; one of several innovation and technology centres set up by UK government to bring together scientists and businesses to support the development of new products and services. The fellow will work with the Catapult's partners in the EO commercial service sector to help identify where NERC science can overcome existing barriers to service provision in terms of technical knowledge, expertise or underpinning environmental information. By so doing, it is anticipated that NERC funded science can be translated into commercial products and services with strong socio-economic benefits to the wider world.

The fellow will address a number of activities to stimulate joint projects and collaborative working. These will include presentations to industry meetings and academic groups as well as joint workshops where different parties can meet and discuss common interests. The work will seek not just to form new linkages, and strength existing ones, but will seek to translate those connections into collaborative activities such as joint projects or studentships. To this end, the fellow will actively support industrial-academic collaborations in terms of bidding, helping to lead proposals to turn novel ideas into real projects and service prototypes.
The outcome of the fellow's activities will be a set of demonstration projects which will illustrate the potential use of EO data in collaboration with environmental science. The fellow will also demonstrate the impact of NERC research in terms of wider socio-economic benefit.

This fellowship is strongly focused on the exploitation of environmental information over land, and will focus on issues such as biodiversity, environmental management, agricultural monitoring and insurance, precision farming, plantations monitoring and the impact of pests and diseases. The work is by no means limited to these topics and will consider the wider application of environmental science in terms of the energy sector (e.g. renewables and biofuels) as well as other sectors where strong potential for commercial services based on EO datasets are found.