The Airbus Endeavr Program has played a major part in promoting the Living Wales project, including through the provision of a platform for highlighting the project objectives and outcomes, discussing actual and future contributions to business and the Welsh economy in general and exploring opportunities for utilising freely available but also commercial satellite sensor data.
A particular advantage of the Living Wales approach is that land cover and change classifications are generated by simply combining environmental variables with unit measures (e.g., %, m, days). Hence, the approach can be applied at any scale and time as long as relevant data are available. AIRBUS and its partners have unique access to a wide range of multi-modal drone, airborne and satellite sensor data from which a wide range of environmental variable can be derived, either currently or into the future. These data can either be used for generating land cover maps or provide supportive datasets that can validate the national level mapping undertaken through Living Wales. Aberystwyth University is increasingly exploring the use of deep learning for routinely and automatically extracting information from Earth observation data and such approaches are particularly useful for future development and application.