Commercial

About

In addition to supporting UK academia, the facility also has the capacity to work with British industry, offering our full variety of services available to academics. FSF has engaged and collaborated with British industry several times through equipment loans and calibration/validation projects. All commercial collaborations with FSF are intended to advance innovation and technical excellence, while ensuring they do not directly compete with services provided by British industry.

In collaboration with agricultural entrepeneurs, Messium, our Headwall Co-Aligned system was used to survey and understand the spread of potato blight.

“The NERC Field Spectroscopy Facility were highly supportive of our R&D activities, helping Messium lead the world in hyperspectral machine learning analysis of agriculture. Our collaboration achieved an unprecedented level of detail, assessing crops in-season through a unique combination of lab tests, field spectroscopy, hyperspectral drones and state-of-the-art hyperspectral satellites—all deployed in parallel. This comprehensive analysis across both spatial and spectral resolutions enabled Messium to accelerate its research at the fastest possible pace.”

Other previous partnerships with FSF include ClydeHSI, PeakDesign, University College Dublin, Analytik, and Global Trust Group.

What we offer

Optical Laboratory

The dark optical laboratory calibrates and characterizes all of the facility’s instruments, ensuring measurements are traceable, calibrated, and have quantifiable uncertainty. This ensures your measurements are comparible across time and space. FSF can also calibrate instruments owned by our loan users. For more information, see our Optical Laboratory Suite.

Field Spectrometers

The facility houses numerous hyperspectral spectroradiometers which measure wavelengths from 350-2500 nm across the electromagnetic spectrum. This includes the ultraviolet, visible, near- and shortwave regions, providing essential information in multidisciplinary fields of science. Example fields include ecology (e.g. vegetation health), cryosphere studies (e.g. sea ice reflectance), geology (e.g. materials detection), and wider earth observation (e.g. ground based validation of satellites).

UAVs and Sensors

FSF has multispectral cameras, thermal and RGB imagers, as well as two hyperspectral imagers. These can all be attached to unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) for aerial surveying. If you require assistance choosing the right instrument, the facility can advise on which sensor is appropriate for your purpose.

Atmospheric Monitoring

The spectral atmospheric suite includes instrumentation to measure atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and gaseous pollutants. This suite can also measure aerosol optical depth, applicable to validating satellite measurements for your upcoming missions.

Solar Induced Fluorescence

This suite measures solar induced fluorescence (SIF), an increasingly prevalent technique which is essential to measuring vegetation health. This has direct implications to estimating photosynthesis rates and accurate crop yields. The SIF suite includes both UAV and ground based instrumentation.

Bio-Optical Underwater

The bio-optical underwater suite contains instruments which are designed to operate underwater. They are hyperspectral imagers that operate in the UV to visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum, aiming to understand how light interacts with water. Other uses for this suite are ocean color measurements to study marine vegetation, as well as water quality improvement schemes.

For more information on our instrument suites, see our Instruments page.

Example applications

Sensor Development: Calibration testing for airborne campaigns.

Analytic Developers: Testing and monitoring change detection and object identification algorithms.

Future satellite Developers: Providing ground and near-Earth sensors for validation in broader wavelength ranges during satellite development.

Drone operators: Supplying sensors capable of measuring beyond the standard RBG/NIR wavelengths.

Land managers: Assisting in the development of land restoration techiques, including agricultural crop disease detection and habitat rebuilding.

Application Process

If you are interested in partnering with FSF, please contact us via email at fsf@nerc.ac.uk regarding your project’s requirements. We offer a variety of services that provide a unique research and development perspective, with fair, market rates. We are more than happy to discuss your project, please enquire for more information.