here 
tili 
( ag 
ated 
of 
and 
Eric 
cost 
190s 
nage 
ideo 
now 
and 
Lose 
Le 
ion 
irge 
iuse 
to 
In 
now 
and 
ish 
is 
or 
ngs 
“in 
sly 
ake 
sts 
es, 
ave 
et, 
The 
ing 
ts, 
any 
ers 
eys 
eas 
ary 
act 
ms, 
ade 
and 
ive 
ry, 
il, 
2as 
ist 
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),