tvis > News > Satellite pictures allow you to identify illegal mining of amber
07.12.16

Satellite pictures allow you to identify illegal mining of amber

There has been a lot of illegal mining of amber in Polesie. The interests of business, locals, power and crime faced here. Thousands of hectares of mutilated lands, wood and contractions, sometimes with the use of weapons.

However, even in such conditions there are people who are willing to pay considerable money for a license for the extraction of amber, invested in geological methods of deposits, pay taxes. One of these decisive entrepreneurs addressed TVIS.

The entrepreneur received a license of the State Geongyedra, developed a project of mining and land reclamation, opened a credit line in the bank – everything was ready to get started. However, it was unexpectedly that his licensed site on Rivneshchin is already being developed. By whom? “Black prospectors” from the surrounding villages. How now to prove that part of the amber reserves is stolen, and the losses reach tens of thousands of hryvnia?

TVIS provided an entrepreneur Space Pictures of Spot-7 and Pleiades of ultra-high resolution, obtained in the summer of 2015 and spring and in the summer of 2016 on the first two – still undisturbed landscape. And on the latter – all the consequences of the work of local diggers. After processing and decrypting the pictures, a map of disturbed lands was drawn up, “copanks” detected, ways of entry of machines with motor-pumps. Using GIS is calculated likely the amount of damage.

It should be noted that this is not the first case when on satellite data is recorded the activities of “black prospectors” in the Western regions of Ukraine.

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