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3. REMOTE SENSING
Remote sensing is becoming more and more
widespread in almost every walk of life. It is
now being introduced into the national curriculum
at schools in both geography and science; and
teaching material, including workpacks and
satellite imagery, is being developed for schools.
Most undergraduate geography and environmental
science courses, as well as meteorology and
geology courses, introduce some remote sensing to
a greater or lesser extent. This has made it
impossible to produce a detailed analysis for this
report. Similarly, in the commercial world, the
number of new enterprises has proliferated
(admittedly one or two have closed) reflecting the
increased use of remote sensing, increased
environmental awareness and the increased amount
of data coming on-stream.
After playing it cool on the involvement of
Britain in the European Space Programme, the
Government has now given strong backing to the
Earth Observation programme, and the Prime
Minister is indeed taking the initiative in
developing international collaboration in the use
of satellite data for environmental monitoring.
This is, of course, against the background of
fears of global warming, the greenhouse effect and
ozone depletion.
3.1 Changing patterns of employment
In general there was an air of buoyancy and
optimism amongst respondents, with over 80$
claiming expansion since 1988 (often by large
factors) and only 3, all educational establish-
ments, saying they have diminished activity
(mostly for organisational reasons). Increased
teaching in Universities, growth of global change
studies, significant improvements in workstation
price/performance, growing recognition of the need
to integrate GIS with remote sensing, the coming
together of digital photogrammetry with remote
sensing, involvement in large national and
international programmes, the opening up of
Eastern and Central Europe, the establishment of a
coherent satellite programme for the 1990s and the
increase in data volume were all cited as reasons
for this. Amongst the few complaints were the
cost of data and the lack of public funding,
mostly by a few educational establishments.
With no comparable figures in the 1988 report, it
is not easy to comment on any change in employment
pattern. The responses produced the following
breakdown according to size:
TABLE 3.1
Employment Number of
(person years) Organisations
over 25 12
6-25 29
1-5 48
less than 1 15
Incomplete responses account for the total not
being equal to the 108 responses received. At
least one commercial organisation declined to give
any information for reasons of commercial
confidentiality.
55
No private organisation admitted to less than 1
person year, and only 2 government institutions
and 2 educational establishments stated more than
25 person years. More than three quarters of all
respondents employed between one and 25 people.
One private company claimed to employ 125 people
on remote sensing-related activities, and another
that its staffing had increased from 10 in 1988 to
70: in 1992. Both these companies have been
involved in the setting up of NRSC Ltd and it is
not clear whether these refer to new jobs or just
reorganisations within and between existent
employers.
The distribution in each category respectively
was:
Government - 27 3, 12, 7
Private - 8, 8, 9, 0
Educational - 2, 16, 25, 8
3.2 Applications
The response to the question on activities
elicited the following information:
TABLE 3.2
main major minor
2508 10-50$ «10$
Education/training 19 33 7
Research 13 41 5
Consultancy 2 26 &
Manuf/software devt 6 8 5
Distribution etc 2 2 =
National mapping = 2 =
Project mapping = 311 1
National Res Survs = 11 1
Project Res Survs = 16 3
Protection of Environment - 7 3
Hydro/Oceanography 2 10 2
Met/Space 1 9 -
1 15 3
Monitoring Change
A number of points must be noted:
Only just over 100 replies were received (27 from
private organisations, 27 from Government
institutions and 54 from "non-profit
institutions", which were in fact almost all
educational establishments), and this therefore
may not accurately reflect the smaller users and
those who use remote sensing only incidentally.
There seemed to be some confusion in interpreting
the question by a few respondents who did not
consider the headings to be mutually exclusive.
They considered that the types of activity
(education, research, consultancy etc) could be
further subdivided into application (mapping,
surveys, meteorology etc) and hence the total
sometimes came to well over 100%! It is not known
to what extent this confusion affected other
responses.
The group "major" should perhaps be subdivided in
that this group contains a great number of 50$ and
10$ responses with not many in between.
The different sectors showed different usage
patterns. Education establishments, understand-
ably, predominate in the fields of education and
training (14,25,1 in the respective categories),