(PRWEB) October 15, 2013
Geospatial Data Analysis Corporation (GDA), a leader in satellite-based agricultural and environmental intelligence gathering, analysis and distribution, is pleased to announce a contract award with the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), Office of Global Analysis (OGA), International Production Assessment Division (IPAD). OGA/IPAD is responsible for global crop condition assessments and estimates of area, yield, and production for grains, oilseeds, and cotton. Their primary mission is to target, collect, analyze, and disseminate timely, objective, useful, and cost-effective global crop condition and agricultural market intelligence information.
The contract continues a successful multi-year relationship between the USDA and GDA. GDA President Dr. Stephanie Hulina stated, "We are honored to be selected once again to continue our work for IPAD. GDA is uniquely positioned to supply remote sensing inputs to IPAD’s convergence of evidence methodologies and support their mission to provide unbiased commodity estimates to create a marketing edge for U.S. producers in world markets. We have been continually developing a science-based program in agricultural remote sensing and analysis over the last decade while further evolving our technology to be truly operational, web interactive and transparent to our clients."
Via this USDA SBIR Phase III award, GDA will be continuing to provide to USDA’s IPAD subscription-level services of both GeoSynergy and CropSignal web applications as well as on-demand rapid image processing products for regional crop travel and analysis, disaster response, and special studies.
GDA CropSignal® web service is an operational, interactive agricultural intelligence web service for the analysis of global national and sub-national crop statistics and crop relevant data, crop condition assessment, and yield forecasting.
CropSignal ®provides USDA FAS with an unprecedented combination of statistics from a multitude of most credible sources available in one easy to use, online application. CropSignal® crop datasets include crop statistics, crop progress, and crop condition along with weather and multitude of other crop relevant data.
CropSignal® offers USDA FAS crop analysts 24/7 access to an interactive and customizable user interface, including a rich array of reports, charts, tables, and maps; simple, at-a-glance personalized dashboard views of data that are not only interactive but also automatically updated; customizable data update alerts to ensure 24/7 crop intelligence monitoring; RSS feeds; access to external web pages via CropSignal®; and much more. CropSignal® powerful query, filtering and visualization tools allow users to personalize the data and perform high-level analysis. CropSignal® features state-of-the-art analytical tools, including GDA ran and hands-on, interactive crop yield, area, and production forecasts for USDA FAS.
GDA GeoSynergy® webGIS service is an operational, interactive service to monitor and analyze global land cover, crops, and weather to improve decision making. GeoSynergy® offers a state-of-the-art, transparent, and reliable source of detailed, historical and most current spatial data for visualization, monitoring, and analysis of global and regional agriculture and land cover.
GeoSynergy provides USDA/FAS with timely access to global MODIS, Landsat, and Landsat-class satellite imagery and products, GDA crop analytics based on the satellite imagery, weather datasets, crop statistics, crop and land cover maps. Via GeoSynergy USDA FAS crop analysts can analyze surface reflectance calibrated Landsat-class imagery and in NRT generate crop maps, calculate crop acreage statistics, and perform data drilling, mining, and charting.
GDA will also be providing value-added data products derived from medium and high resolution satellite imagery to the USDA FAS to support special events such as targeted crop field travel, floods, droughts and other natural events. GDA maintains an operational end-to-end image processing system for large volume image processing, and delivers rapid, NRT map products such as orthorectification, true surface reflection calibration, cloud and shadow assessments, crop type and flood maps to USDA FAS crop analysts to support their regional efforts.
Established in 2002, GDA is a woman-owned small business (WOSB) that provides geospatial information products and services from the majority of commercial and public Remote Sensing platforms and aids clients with their geospatial work in the agricultural, resource management, and intelligence domains, to name just a few. GDA’s Product/Service focus is in four primary areas: image pre-processing, Remote Sensing-based agricultural intelligence, regional land cover and processes monitoring and mapping, and spatial analytical web processing and online geospatial services. GDA has invested years of R&D, backed by sixteen (16) U.S. Federal Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) awards, into the development of algorithms for image preprocessing in order to enhance the analysis of the data, as well as into the development of a suite of Remote-Sensing derived agricultural intelligence products detailing crop conditions, crop yield, and crop planted acreage estimates at sub-national levels for major agricultural areas across the globe.
To learn more about GDA and GDA products and services please visit our corporate website at http://www.gdacorp.com or contact Dr. Stephanie Hulina (stephanie at gdacorp dot com).
This contract is based upon work supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under Agreement No. C1056P1, and by the U.S. NASA under Agreement Nos. NNS04AA13C, NNS05AA30C, and NNC06CB47C of the Small Business Innovation Research Program.