ESMERALDA SAS

ESMERALDA is working tirelessly to contribute to the Great Green Wall Initiative, and the Ile Dotun project in Nigeria is our flagship project. Find out more by watching this video! #SustainableDevelopment #GlobalImpact #remotesensing #environment #sustainablefinance #ecosystemrestoration #landegradationneutrality Alain Retiere Hinrich Paulsen 🇪🇺 Jürgen Ackermann Markus Neteler Michel Ackermann Nicolas Ackermann Philippe GISQUET Oliver Herrmann Xenia Paulsen

ESMERALDA is working tirelessly to contribute to the Great Green Wall Initiative, and the Ile Dotun project in Nigeria is our flagship project. Find out more by watching this video! #SustainableDevelopment #GlobalImpact #remotesensing #environment #sustainablefinance #ecosystemrestoration #landegradationneutrality Alain Retiere Hinrich Paulsen 🇪🇺 Jürgen Ackermann Markus Neteler Michel Ackermann Nicolas Ackermann Philippe GISQUET Oliver Herrmann Xenia Paulsen

We're thrilled to share some feedback from some of our project partners in Africa with you! Thank you MAIMUNA JABBIE and HRM King Benjamin! #SustainableDevelopment #GlobalImpact #remotesensing #environment #sustainablefinance #ecosystemrestoration #landegradationneutrality

🌱 How ESMERALDA-STARTER is Attracting Investment in Ecosystem Restoration The financial world is waking up to the value of nature—but connecting investment to on-the-ground ecosystem restoration has always been a challenge. Enter ESMERALDA-STARTER, a game-changer in creating sustainable business models that support local communities, ecosystems and financial returns. 🌍💼 Here’s how it’s done: 🔗 Bridging the Gap: ESMERALDA-STARTER builds models that meet investors' needs—complete with due diligence and securities through public loans—while prioritizing local expertise and commodities. 📊 Aligning Goals: Financial returns and nature can thrive together. With rigorous project evaluation and transparent reporting via ESMERALDA-TRACKER, investors can confidently put their funds into projects that deliver real ecological and financial outcomes. 👥 Empowering Local Communities: It’s not just about restoring ecosystems. By designing the project with the local populations, these projects will create economic opportunities, ensuring sustainability at every level. ESMERALDA-STARTER is proof that investment and ecosystem restoration are no longer at odds. They’re in harmony. 🌿💡 🔔 Ready to explore a new kind of investment opportunity? Let’s bridge finance and nature, one project at a time. #SustainableDevelopment #GlobalImpact #remotesensing #environment #sustainablefinance #empower #landegradationneutrality Alain Retiere Hinrich Paulsen 🇪🇺 Jürgen Ackermann Markus Neteler Michel Ackermann Nicolas Ackermann Philippe GISQUET Oliver Herrmann Xenia Paulsen  

🌍 Cloudy weather? So What?! ☁️   Have you ever thought about how clouds can get in the way of earth observation? They can be a formidable challenge, obscuring the Earth's surface and complicating data analysis. But thanks to innovative techniques, specialists can still extract valuable insights from satellite images. Here’s how: 1. Cloud Masking: Identifying and excluding cloud-covered areas to focus on the clear, actionable data. 2. Cloud Filtering & Composite Imaging: Creating cloud-free images by combining multiple images over time. 3. Multi-Temporal Analysis: Tracking changes over time, even with intermittent cloud cover. 4. SAR Imaging: Leveraging microwave signals to see through clouds and maintain continuous surface monitoring. 5. Advanced Cloud Detection Algorithms: Using AI to distinguish clouds from bright surfaces like snow and ice. 6. Post-Processing Techniques: Correcting cloud-affected data with statistical methods and image enhancements. 7. Cloud-Shadow Detection & Removal: Identifying and mitigating the impact of cloud shadows for clearer imagery.   These techniques empower us to harness the full potential of satellite data, ensuring that clouds don’t cloud our vision of the Earth’s surface. 🔭   #EarthObservation #SatelliteImagery #RemoteSensing #Geospatial #AI #Innovation #DataScience Alain Retiere Hinrich Paulsen 🇪🇺 Jürgen Ackermann Markus Neteler Michel Ackermann Nicolas Ackermann Philippe GISQUET Oliver Herrmann   

❔EUD what?! 🌍 EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR): What It Is, Why It Matters, and Who It Affects The EUDR is a landmark initiative aimed at curbing global deforestation by ensuring that certain commodities sold within or exported from the EU do not contribute to deforestation or forest degradation. Enforced from June 2023, with full compliance expected by December 2024, the EUDR requires companies to prove that their products are deforestation-free—meaning they are not produced on land that has been deforested after December 31, 2020. 🤔 Why Does EUDR Exist? EUDR was introduced as part of the EU's broader strategy to fight climate change and protect biodiversity. The regulation acknowledges the EU's significant role in global deforestation, driven largely by the consumption of commodities like soy, palm oil, cattle, wood, and cocoa. By enforcing stringent checks on these products, the EU aims to reduce its carbon footprint and halt the loss of critical forest ecosystems, thus contributing to the global fight against climate change. 🔎 Who Does EUDR concern? The regulation primarily impacts companies operating within the EU that trade in commodities associated with deforestation. This includes not just large operators but also small and medium-sized enterprises, although they have a slightly longer timeline for compliance. The EUDR's scope covers a wide range of products, from leather and rubber to wood and coffee, and it affects every player in the supply chain—from producers and traders to final sellers within the EU. Non-EU companies exporting to the EU will also need to comply, making it a global concern for businesses involved in these commodities. In essence, the EUDR is more than just a regulation; it's a commitment by the EU to lead the global charge in responsible consumption and production, ensuring that what ends up in European markets does not come at the cost of the planet's forests. 📢 You’ve been folowing ESMERALDA fo a while now and know, we’re all about preserving the living world. That’s why we are working on a service to help companies comply with the EUDR. Stay tuned for more details! #EuropeaUnion #EUDR #SustainableDevelopment #GlobalImpact #remotesensing #environment #sustainablefinance #deforestation #landegradationneutrality   Alain Retiere Hinrich Paulsen 🇪🇺 Jürgen Ackermann Markus Neteler Michel Ackermann Nicolas Ackermann Philippe GISQUET Oliver Herrmann

COMMUNICATION IS KEY, RIGHT? 🗣 ESMERALDA TRACKER is an ideal tool for importing, analysing and managing geodata collected during environmental projects. Communicating these findings effectively is crucial. Our comprehensive reporting module allows you to easily create detailed reports, including maps and statistics. 📍🗺 MAP REPORTS: After analysing satellite data and incorporating project geometries or external data, these elements appear in the layer tree. You can interactively select data layers, adjust zoom levels and define the map section for your report. Customise your map report with legends, scale bars and annotations. Generate a high-quality PDF for third-party applications or printing with a SINGLE CLICK. 🖱 📊 STATISTICAL REPORTS: Activate pre-calculated layers to create insightful geo-statistical reports. Analyse and summarise Sentinel data for land use/cover classifications and changes over time. Depending on the topic we are reporting on, we include processing time, identifiers & total number of datasets / scenes used, as well as quality indicators such as accuracy in the statistical report. Whether for further processing, action or fundraising, ESMERALDA TRACKER‘s flexible reporting tools document progress and support ecosystem restoration at multiple levels. 💬 YOUR FEEDBACK MATTERS: We are constantly striving to improve. Share your reporting needs with us – we are delighted to taylor our tool to your needs. 🚀 Let‘s make data-driven decisions together! 🚀 #GeoData #Reporting #ESMERALDATRACKER #SatelliteData #Mapping #Geostatistics #EcosystemRestoration #DataAnalysis #Innovation  Alain Retiere Hinrich Paulsen 🇪🇺 Jürgen Ackermann Markus Neteler Michel Ackermann Nicolas Ackermann Philippe GISQUET Oliver Herrmann  

🔐 At ESMERALDA, we take data security and integrity very seriously, especially when dealing with our customers' geospatial data. That's why we are building a robust authentication and access control framework into ESMERALDA TRACKER. We're also developing a concept of user rights and roles to ensure that data remains under the control of the organisation. Here's how it works: 1. Registration: Users register on our platform through a simple self-registration process at https://lnkd.in/ebwt28SZ 2. Organisational structure: System administrators can create organisations, users and projects. Once logged in, users can see all public projects and users, while private data remains invisible. 3. Roles and Permissions: Users are categorised into roles - power users, editors and read-only users. Power users can manage and manipulate data, editors can create and edit projects and read-only users can only view data. This structure ensures that data is handled securely and appropriately by different stakeholders, from tree planting organisations to universities and local communities. Users can be invited by email and associated with specific projects, maintaining control over who has access to what information. 🛂With ESMERALDA TRACKER, organisations can confidently manage their projects and decide who has what level of access to their data. #DataSecurity #SpatialData #ESMERALDA #Sustainability #LandRestoration #UserRoles #AccessControl Alain Retiere Hinrich Paulsen 🇪🇺 Jürgen Ackermann Markus Neteler Michel Ackermann Nicolas Ackermann Philippe GISQUET Oliver Herrmann

🛰ESMERALDA uses free satellite data collected by Europe's Copernicus Sentinel satellites. 📡 Considering that the data collected by the Sentinels has a spatial resolution of 10 metres, this is impressive, especially when you realise that this is being done continuously across the globe. The resulting volumes of data are equally staggering. However, for some practical applications, such as mapping access to restoration sites, this spatial resolution is often not good enough, as a path two to three metres wide is unlikely to show up in the collected image. Also, if you are interested in individual trees, the very young and small ones cannot be seen. Many organisations are trying to overcome these disadvantages by using drones to capture images with much higher spatial resolution. This is a valid approach, but it has some drawbacks: 1.     you have to buy the drone, which can cost thousands of dollars 2.     the drone pilot has to travel to and from the area of interest 3.     the data collected is usually only in the red (R), green (G) and blue (B) spectral bands, which offer limited analysis capabilities 4.     local data volumes tend to be very large and need to be stored and processed; and 5.     drone imaging is feasible for a few hundred hectares, but does not scale well to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of hectares. 🔭 Very high resolution (VHR) satellite images: It does not have the aforementioned drawbacks and is easily accessible through ESMERALDA TRACKER. The most obvious differences with Sentinel data are the spatial and temporal resolution and the cost. The spatial resolution goes down to 0.53 metres and images are only acquired on request. The customer has to pay for this additional data option. Prices can vary, but are usually no more than a few dollars per hectare when a satellite is ordered to take a new image. The price drops significantly when images from the archive are accessed. Compared to drone imagery, satellite data is very attractively priced from our perspective and is scalable to very large areas.   In ESMERALDA-TRACKER, accessing this type of satellite data is as easy as accessing any other data. The user simply needs to define the area of interest by drawing a bounding box on the map, decide on the desired time period and specify the amount of acceptable cloud cover. The system then accesses the archive of a commercial satellite data provider and retrieves the imagery, which is automatically delivered to the ESMERALDA TRACKER layer tree. The data is automatically geo-referenced and, due to the multi-spectral bands of the image, can be analysed like any other satellite data. The development roadmap for ESMERALDA-TRACKER includes access to satellite tasking, allowing users to acquire new data sets if the archive does not provide sufficiently detailed or recent data. 🌏📚

🏃🏽♀👟 This Friday sees the opening of the Olympic Games in France. At ESMERALDA, we are deeply inspired by the spirit of unity, perseverance and cultural exchange. The Olympic Games symbolise the coming together of different nations to compete with respect and to achieve extreme performance. This vibrant convergence resonates deeply with our mission at ESMERALDA. At ESMERALDA, a Franco-German joint venture, we are dedicated to restoring degraded land through our Land Degradation Neutrality projects. Just as athletes work tirelessly to achieve their best, we are committed to revitalising our planet so that future generations can inherit a world where nature thrives in harmony with human progress. Our work is not just about restoring the environment, but about fostering a sustainable relationship between people and the land we all share. The Olympic Games remind us that true achievement comes through cooperation, determination and respect for each other and our planet. Every athlete's journey to the Games is a testament to what can be achieved through dedication and hard work. Similarly, our projects require the same level of commitment and cooperation across borders, reflecting the Olympic spirit of unity and excellence. Just like the athletes, we prepare our projects thoroughly, implement them together with local communities and collect feedback and data to improve their implementation. The real difference between the Olympic Games and Land Degradation Neutrality projects is that in our case there are no losers. Everyone should benefit positively from LDN. Yes, the Olympics are not perfect and many things can be improved from a social, economic and environmental perspective. But there are also many positive developments. As we strive to create a better and fairer world, let us also enjoy and celebrate our athletes and this cultural meeting! #Olympics2024 #Sustainability #ESMERALDA #LandRestoration #UnityInDiversity #EnvironmentalStewardship Alain Retiere Hinrich Paulsen 🇪🇺 Jürgen Ackermann Markus Neteler Michel Ackermann Nicolas Ackermann Philippe GISQUET Oliver Herrmann Xenia Paulsen