In the field of agriculture, crop analysis techniques using satellite imagery have been developed to conduct field survey effectively for grasping agricultural information, such as crop acreage, yield and grain quality. However, in case that the estimation model is constructed based on the field data, abnormal field data should be excluded to prevent adverse effects. The abnormal fields are extracted based on Mahalanobis’ distance and NDVI of fields calculated using SPOT satellite imagery. We conducted a field survey in Hokkaido to accumulate knowledge about the condition of the extracted fields on the ground. The extracted fields included undamaged fields including ‘growth delay’ and ‘no growth delay’ and damaged fields including ‘rice blast’, ‘sediment inflow’, ‘cool weather’, ‘flooded’, and ‘lodging’. Experimental results show that Mahalanobis’ distance is more suitable for detecting these field than NDVI.

The recent rapid increase in the number of sika deer (Cervus nippon) and the expansion of their habitat has caused serious damage to the forest ecosystem. In order to reduce the damage caused by deer, population reduction and physical control could be considered. For this purpose, knowledge of the population in target areas is important. However, it is difficult to estimate the population in such areas by conventional methods such as a light census. Therefore, development of new population estimation methods is needed. In this study, we compare the spatial distribution and number of sika deer in Ozegahara detected by light census and aerial photographs taken using a drone to contribute to the above-mentioned objective using a remote sensing technique. Results showed that although the survey efficiency of the light census was higher than that of the drone, the number of deer detected by drone was more than four times higher. This was because the light census could not detect deer in places far from the boardwalk. In contrast, aerial photographs could detect the deer in any place. Thus, aerial photographs taken by drone may play an important role in monitoring deer populations in places, such as Ozegahara, where it is difficult to apply a light census to the whole area.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created difficulties in daily lives and caused various changes in socioeconomic activities and environments. In response, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is considering how JAXA can contribute to our changing society. JAXA has cooperated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) in developing the Earth Observing Dashboard to provide information showing the impact of environmental and economic activities related to COVID-19 from available earth observation satellites data. The data from the three agencies includes the GOSAT, GOSAT-2, ALOS-2 and GCOM-C. This paper introduces an overview and preliminary results of this trilateral cooperation.