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Hello and welcome to the conversation from the BBC World Service, the program that amplifies women's voices.
We bring two women together from different countries who share an expertise or experience and we see what happens.
I'm Ella Alshamahi and today, after a year of devastating floods around the globe, we're talking about using tech and data to tackle coastal erosion.
Sara Dole is a Sri Lankan physicist and entrepreneur leading a project in the Maldives, the world's lowest lying country, looking at the rate at which beaches erode.
Ann Law Beck is French and studies data from satellites to map and monitor coastal erosion and advises coastal management and protection plans.
Welcome to you both.
Ann Law, you are a geomatic and remote sensing engineer.
Now, I've heard of remote sensing engineers.
I have not heard geomatic.
Could you possibly explain a little bit more?
Geomatic is the combination of two geography and informatics.
So it's quite a new discipline.
When you have remote sensing, you acquire a lot of spatialized data, meaning that you have information at a very specific location and time on the globe.
The geomatic discipline will help you generate, manipulate and transform this type of data, combine them with other source of data to actually get useful information for any user down the stream.
And remote sensing, could you explain that a little?
So remote sensing is more data acquisition techniques without a direct contact with your subject.
So I'm specialized in satellite remote sensing, meaning that it's the satellite above the atmosphere that is acquiring data on the earth.
And Sara, we will be going into this in more detail later in the program.
But you're working on natural ways to protect coastlines.