Isabelle Piccard is a senior researcher at VITO Remote Sensing. After graduating from KULeuven  as a Bio-Engineer, Isabelle started her professional career working as pea breeder for a Belgian-Dutch seed company. She joined VITO Remote Sensing in 2001, where she has been involved in many national and international projects – both as a scientist and project manager. Over the years, Isabelle has built up extensive expertise in the use of satellite images for crop mapping, crop monitoring, damage and risk assessment, including agricultural insurances.

All actors in the agriculture value chain – from input suppliers to farmers and food processors – can make better decisions using remote sensing information.

Currently, Isabelle mainly focuses on developing products and services for crop monitoring based on time series of high resolution satellite data. She is one of the founders of “WatchITgrow”, an online service for potato monitoring in Belgium which combines Sentinel-2 satellite data with weather, soil and plant data, monitoring crop development and providing timely yield estimates.