About a year ago I wrote about my experiences of mapping in Bonaire. It’s time for an update.

Satellite imagery

One of the challenges I had was adding data without high quality and recent imagery. Luckily, earlier this year the ‘Satellietdataportaal’ (Satellite Data Portal) made high resolution data available for Caribbean Netherlands.¹

License

First things first though: are we allowed to use the aerial photos they publish for improving OpenStreetMap? There is a long thread on the Community forums. Whether it’s allowed or not depends on the agreement the Dutch government has with the satellite data provider.² Luckily, in the topic itself it is discussed that it is allowed to use Pléiades, SuperView and TripleSat.

Geoblock

The downside? You can only use this in The Netherlands. The data is geoblocked. I’ve added a lot of new streets and buildings in Bonaire over the past few weeks, but only other people currently in The Netherlands would be able to validate that I’m mapping actual buildings. The rest of the world would need to wait for a worldwide aerial imagery provider to update their data.

Selecting the satellite data

In the Satellite Data Portal Viewer, after selecting Bonaire from the top left menu, you then need to select a part of the area for which you want to see the satellite data, then it gives you a list of options. Currently for Bonaire there are only three options (as we’re only interested in recent and high resolution satellite data). * Pleiades-NEO January 9, 2023 * Pleiades-NEO April 18, 2023 * Pleiades-NEO June 17, 2023

The January one is generally too cloudy, but the April and June ones are useful. Use the April one if you’re looking at the Western part of Bonaire (Rincon and Washingtong Slagbaai National Park) and use the June one for Kralendijk and all of the east and south.

You can simply click on ‘Select for WMTS’ which fetches you a link.³

Setting the background

As I’m on an Apple computer, I’m not really fond of JOSM for mapping. I know it’s a better powertool than the online iD editor, but JOSM just doesn’t play nice with Apple devices, trackpads and the way I use shortcuts.

For the iD editor, we can set a custom background if we click on the bottom option for the background. We then need to input a specific URL with parameters. The URL you’ll want to use is one of the following:

April 2023 / Kralendijk / East & South Bonaire

https://wmts.satellietdataportaal.nl/wmts/Pleiades-NEO-2023-4-RGB/service?SERVICE=WMTS&REQUEST=GetTile&VERSION=1.0.0&LAYER=20230418_151402_PNEO-04_1_1_30cm_UTM19_8bit_RGB_Bonaire&STYLE=default&FORMAT=image%2Fpng&TILEMATRIXSET=EPSG%3A3857&TILEMATRIX={zoom}&TILEROW={y}&TILECOL={x}

June 2023 / Rincon / North and West Bonaire

https://wmts.satellietdataportaal.nl/wmts/Pleiades-NEO-2023-6-RGB/service?SERVICE=WMTS&REQUEST=GetTile&VERSION=1.0.0&LAYER=20230617_151746_PNEO-03_2_1_30cm_UTM19_8bit_RGB_Bonaire&STYLE=default&FORMAT=image%2Fpng&TILEMATRIXSET=EPSG%3A3857&TILEMATRIX={zoom}&TILEROW={y}&TILECOL={x}

Aerial imagery

As far as I’m aware, there are also efforts of making high quality aerial photos available similar to what is the case for the ‘regular part’ of The Netherlands. In January they took photos from a plane, the question is if and when those will be published.

Footnotes

1. The Satellite Data Portal is part of the ‘Netherlands Space Office’. I didn’t even know we have our own space agency! ↩

2. The different agreements are published on their website. ↩

3. It’s actually called ‘Selecteer voor’ instead of ‘Select for’ but the Satellite Data Portal Viewer is not available in English, but I am writing this post in English. ↩