Company background
Space Intelligence provides maps of forests, deforestation and forest degradation. Based on a foundation of world-class science, we formed the company in response to the growing number of requests for satellite data analysis in the private and public sectors.
We are committed to providing high quality products and services, whether that is classification of satellite imagery, advising on data acquisition and processing, or implementing large scale forest monitoring programmes for our clients.
We have research and consultancy experience across the tropics, with projects undertaken in Africa, Asia and the Americas. We also undertake work closer to home, having conducted landscape analysis for the UK Government’s Department of Energy and Industrial Strategy, and more recently with the Forestry Commission here in Scotland.
We believe that the analysis of satellite data will be transformational as companies and countries increase their commitments to improve sustainability: these commitments require robust monitoring, and we are extremely well placed to provide those monitoring services.
Team
Murray Collins, Chief Executive Officer
Murray has spent much of the past fifteen years collecting data and traveling in the forests of Africa and Asia, seeing forest and habitat destruction first hand.
He holds an interdisciplinary PhD from the London School of Economics, and the Institute of Zoology, ZSL; an MSc with Distinction from Imperial College London; and a BSc from University College London, with a term spent on ERASMUS at La Sorbonne, Paris V. He has certificates in Radar polarimetry from the European Space Agency (ESRIN); and Tropical Field Botany from the Royal Botanical Gardens Edinburgh.
Murray’s PhD research integrated causal inference techniques of Difference-In-Difference, regression and propensity-score matching; along with forest surveys and cutting-edge satellite radar sensing techniques to assess the performance of forest management projects.
Since then he has been based at the University of Edinburgh programming algorithms to analyse satellite radar data for mapping deforestation and forest degradation.
He has published peer reviewed papers on mapping forest biomass, deforestation and forest degradation using satellite radar data; quantifying emissions from protected forests around the world; REDD policy; and has worked as a consultant providing such information for numerous clients globally.
He is also an expert in climate legislation particularly as relates to forests; co-authoring on the 3rd and 4th Global Climate Legislation Studies (GLOBE 2013/2015), reviewing hundreds of climate laws from 99 countries, and presenting the results to assembled governments at the World Bank in 2014.
He retains an interest in valuing the ecosystems which Space Intelligence maps: during his time at the LSE he worked on the economics team of the UK’s National Ecosystem Assessment.
He recently won a highly competitive Royal Society of Edinburgh Enterprise Fellowship supported by the Natural Environment Research Council, and as such is receiving training and mentoring from business leaders while also leading Space Intelligence Ltd.
Ed Mitchard, Chief Scientific Advisor
Ed is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geo Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, and is a recognised leader in the field of satellite mapping of land cover change and forest properties.
He has published over 30 peer reviewed papers in this field, which have been referred to in the scientific literature over 2500 times since 2012.
He has won over £1 million (US$1.3 million) in research funding, from UK and US governments as well as the European Space Agency and the World Bank.
In addition to expertise in developing and testing methods for using different types of satellite data to map forest change, he has also led field campaigns to collect ground data in countries including Brazil, Cameroon, Gabon, Kenya, Peru and Uganda.
He has advised governments including those of Gabon, Cameroon, Colombia and the UK on land use monitoring methods and forest inventory, and conducted training workshops on the use of remote sensing data across the world.
