Karsten Frotscher
Product Manager
Blackbridge
Germany

Biography
Karsten Frotscher is the Product Manager at BlackBridge and owns the RapidEye monitoring programs for agriculture. He directs worldwide programs, managing feasibility, rollout, product distribution, and ensuring the support of customer requirements in precision agriculture. Prior to this Karsten worked with the German Helmholtz institutions, where he held project management roles for applied optical and SAR remote sensing. Karsten is a geographer and holds a Diploma in Geoinformation Technologies from Jena University.

Abstract
BlackBridge Monitoring Programs and Cloud-based Services in Support of Precision Agriculture Practices

Co-Authors: Jason Setzer, Product Manager, BlackBridge

Satellite imagery is particularly useful for efficiently monitoring very large areas and providing regular feedback on the status and productivity of agricultural fields. These data are now widely used in agriculture farming; however, many challenges to make optimal use of this technology remain: easy access to data, management and exploitation of large datasets, and sharing the data and derived information with users. Providing satellite imagery with a cloud computing geospatial processing platform offers a commercially successful method to enable timely and efficient access to important crop information. BlackBridge's monitoring programs for agriculture leverage the collection capacity of the RapidEye satellite constellation, providing access to an enormous pool of multitemporal, multispectral, orthorectified five-meter imagery collected throughout the growing season. Subscribers and their end-users benefit from this unique information source for extracting accurate and timely information on crop variables. Another key feature of these image collection programs is the cloud-based technology supporting them. BlackBridge's GeoCloud Suite empowers users with fast and easy access to imagery collected shortly after acquisition using APIs. In addition, the Geocloud Suite can provide on-demand web processing services for pre-defined information products (vegetation indices) following open standards and thus consumable for a wide range of application software. It also allows users to create processing workflows, making use of their proprietary algorithms to derive information about agricultural fields. The philosophy is bringing algorithms to the data rather than taking the data to the algorithms for better efficiency. Together, collection programs and cloud based services, integrated with localized application software, respond to worldwide demand for managing production, potential, and problems more effectively than blanket applications. The results are reduced costs and improved yields, with an interest in reducing the burden on the environment. Clients are able to accelerate their processes by being collocated with their data in the cloud, as well as reduce capital and operational expenses needed to build and maintain custom systems. Satellite monitoring programs through a cloud solution allow customers to focus more on their core expertise: data and applications.