Free, open source software to see Earth from above

The shortage of widely accepted software tools for effective extraction and analysis of information from the exponentially increasing volume of EO data has led to off-the-shelf solutions. Many in the remotesensing community also design their own tools without sharing them with the wider community.

The EU-funded project TOLOMEO (Tools for open multi-risk assessment using Earth observation data) was initiated to promote international cooperation for the development of free/opensource software solutions. Partners in Europe and South America joined their effort to offer the means to analyse and assess multiple risks.

With a focus on robustness, ease of use and adaptability, the TOLOMEO team developed techniques for mapping human settlements. Nowadays, most of the population live in urban areas, and threats to human lives such as man-made and natural disasters are increasingly perceived as sources of losses in urban areas.

With urban areas and their specific features as input information, researchers have developed tools for assessing human exposure to deforestation risks, earthquake physical vulnerability, flood vulnerability and many others. Eventually, they gathered sample data to validate the developed tools.

The research work of the TOLOMEO partners has now been completed, and the final version of the tools was released to the public. Technical guidelines and connections chains have also been defined for the software parts to create a seamless package.

All of these milestones were accomplished by exploiting the expertise that each of the TOLOMEO partners possessed in the development of software. In particular, extensive staff exchange during the lifetime of the project allowed receiving feedback needed to enhance the tools' designs.

TOLOMEO solutions are expected to help the European remotesensing community to make the most of the wealth of available EO data. Moreover, thanks to TOLOMEO, Europe has established additional channels for continuous cooperation with South America, where Brazil is one of the major players in the exploitation of EO data to support environmental management.