SEAS and development

Remote sensing activities will be good for employment and the economic development of French Guiana. The objective of the SEAS project for remote monitoring of the Amazon environment, is to create a centre of specialised expertise for French Guiana and ultimately for South America. The project includes players from the worlds of business, science, politics and universities in French Guiana.

The role of the Guiana Technopole

The mission of the Guiana Technopole is to facilitate the emergence of projects which can benefit from business start-up funding, so it is particularly enthusiastic about SEAS. It intends to promote the technological expertise of this platform and identify projects which could use this technology. The aim is to promote research work which can lead to applications for companies and local authorities. In the longer term the project should create commercial services which can be marketed in the context of regional cooperation.

With this in mind, the missions of the Guiana Technopole are to :

• provide candidates with technical answers to their questions
• act as an interface between users and the research community, so that the formers' needs are met by the latter
• help initiators of promising projects to achieve them

SEAS will boost the economic development of French Guiana

The SEAS project promises to stimulate the whole of the economy. It will encourage the creation of new businesses for developing the software with which to analyse the data according to user needs. The most likely applications will concern territorial planning: disaster prevention, monitoring biodiversity, managing and monitoring marine resources, mapmaking etc. The needs are such that other countries are considering installing the same type of platform.

Apart from the advantages for business, the development of further education in French Guiana is another important aspect of the project. SEAS will provide research opportunities for the University of Guiana by encouraging the setting up of research teams working on themes that can exploit remote sensing. The fields concerned may be as varied as territorial planning, health or sustainable development. For the moment, however, there are few teams working on these themes and no training available on the use of this resource. SEAS will also encourage the development of training schemes or research programmes on remote sensing techniques and applications. It will also stimulate related fields such as IT, mathematics and image or signal processing.

The SEAS project could also be a starting-point for new inter-regional collaborations in South America. For example, a Brazilian scientific organisation that already buys data from Spot Image could collaborate with organisations in French Guiana to share their knowledge of similar problems.