In Poland, Copernicus data are mainly used by public administration and related institutions. Institutions such as Marshal Offices (Geodesy and Cartography Departments), General and Regional Directorates for Environmental Protection are slowly implementing Copernicus products in their work. There is also a great  interest in products among agricultural institutions, especially in the field of insurance.

Current usage of data and services

In Poland, most of the users are from State Administration and the associated institutions (Marshal Offices Mazovia.pl and Lodzkie.pl), City Offices, Regional Directorate for the Environment, Voivodship Centers and other offices.

Main areas of interest of potential users of EO services in Poland

The main area of interest was Land survey, up to 90 % of users indicated interest in this area, followed by Climate change (44 %), Study of the seas and oceans (27 %), and Crisis management (24 %). The smallest interest was in the study of the Atmosphere (17 %) and Object detection (7 %). The questions in the survey had possibility of the multiple choice. During the meetings, users were mainly interested into topics like:

  • Using the Copernicus land service (CLMS) for spatial planning
  • Agriculture – permanent satellite monitoring, precision agriculture and damage detection (Insurance)
  • Own use for a project, work, research, etc.

In the course of the research, the five main application domains were identified. The use of EO services has a high importance for the respondents in following application domains: Agriculture (30%), Forestry (40%), Emergency monitoring (30%), Territories mapping (46, 7%), and Environmental monitoring (30%).

The surveys’ results identified main practical tasks for each application domain relevant for the region. These tasks are as follows:

  • For agriculture: mapping of agricultural lands and identification of abandoned agricultural land
  • For forestry: detection of forest fires and determining the boundaries of wetlands
  • For emergency monitoring: identification of dangerous deformations of the earth’s surface and structures and damage assessment in emergency situations
  • For territory mapping: creation and updating of a cartographic base for the territory, thematic mapping (mapping of forests, agricultural land) and determining the changes in boundaries of anthropogenic objects
  • For environmental monitoring: identification of changes in ecosystem boundaries and determining landfill boundary changes.

Future usage of EO data and services in Poland

The recognition of Copernicus services is quite high in Poland. However, this situation is not translated into their use in everyday work. In particular, employees of public administration and education staff should be familiarized with the possibilities of implementing Copernicus services data. This would help to improve their work and achieve greater efficiency.

Validity of results

In order to achieve the results we conducted the following tasks:

  • Gathered end-user needs from EO industry
  • Categorised and sort gathered needs
  • Assessed needs and made a gap analysis
  • Listed existing EO services with their categorization and potential sectors / domains where EO services needed
  • Provided all knowledge as EO innovations challenges to be developed within the BalticSatApps project.

We prepared two surveys with questions to gather end-user needs from EO industry. We collected the answers to the surveys via (1) online forms (2) hard copy forms from the events organized or participated. The Polish survey respondents represented different user categories as follows:

  • State Administration – 304 users
  • Universities – 66 users
  • Startups – 53 users
  • Companies – 48 users.