Open-Earth-Monitor project

Hackathons: Land cover mapping and machine learning + Global-FAPAR
2023-09-01 - 2023-09-15 | Online
The first two hackathons of the OEMC project challenge young researchers to map land cover class using machine learning and to model FAPAR at a high spatial resolution

These are the two first of a series of hackathons that will be organized by the OEMC project during its development in order to interact with young researchers.

The winners of each challenge will receive an invitation to present their results at the OEMC Global Workshop in Bolzano, Italy, processing credits in the Open EO platform and, a lifetime subscription to PeerJ Journal.

The Open-Earth-Monitor (OEMC) project launches its first two hackathons and invites young researchers, students and members of the GIS community to explore machine learning solutions for land cover mapping. Similarly, the second hackathon will focus on modeling FAPAR using data-driven approaches. The events will take place online from September 1st to September 15th 2023 and will be hosted by Leandro Parente from OpenGeoHub (OGH) and co-organized by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), CREAF, GILAB, the Institute for Geoinformatics of the Münster University (IFGI), Terrasigna and, Eurac Research.
Since a good machine learning challenge needs to be based on a high quality input dataset, the participants of the first hackathon will work with ground-truth data provided by the LUCAS Survey, funded by the European Commission. Using data about land cover, land use, irrigation management and structural elements of European landscapes, the participants will be asked to map these landscapes using satellite images and machine learning models. The participant with the highest accuracy wins the challenge. As of the second hackathon, Global-FAPAR (Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetic Active Radiation), participants will face a regression problem, i.e. modeling FAPAR at high spatial resolution using data driven approaches and biophysical variables.
You can join us and participate in one of the two challenges by filling out the following registration form. These two hackathons are an opportunity for participants to connect with cutting edge developments and experts in the field of machine learning. It’s also a good chance to improve, share knowledge and build a creditable background within Earth Observation applications.
The winners will be awarded with the chance to assist and present their results at the OEMC Global Workshop taking place in Bolzano, Italy from 4-6 of October. This international event brings together European and global policy-makers, business managers, researchers and civil society to discuss solutions to the greatest challenges in the field of open-source Earth Observation, geospatial applications and state of the art tools to monitor our environment. The winner will also have the opportunity to use the OpenEO Platform, a large-scale cloud platform able to access and analyze billions of satellite images and other Earth Observation data.

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Dataset Access
Land Cover Mapping EU-LUCAS: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8306554
Global-FAPAR: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8306613
Kaggle Competitions
Land Cover Mapping EU-LUCAS: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/oemc-hackathon-global-fapar-modeling
Global-FAPAR: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/oemc-hackathon-eu-land-cover-classification

Local environment
https://gitlab.com/leal.parente/geo-snippets/-/blob/main/hackathon/oemc_hackathon_2023.ipynb
Kaggle notebooks
https://www.kaggle.com/code/leandroparente/oemc-hackathon-2023
Google colab
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1zMZ0x5VAgzPjkbsbpUtWnx8FzoLQezvK

Timeline

September 1, 2023 – Start date.
September 15, 2023 – Final submission deadline.
September 19, 2023 – Organization will contact the winners.
October 4, 2023 – Official announcement of the winners in the OEMC Global Workshop

Deadlines are at 11:59 PM CET on each day, unless stated otherwise.
Organizers can adjust the timeline if needed

Open-Earth-Monitor Global Workshop 2023
2023-10-04 - 2023-10-06 | Eurac Research, Viale Druso 1, Bolzano, 39100, Italy
Organized by OpenGeoHub foundation in collaboration with Eurac Research, the Open-Earth-Monitor Global Workshop 2023 will bring together European and global actors in the field of open-source Earth Observation applications in policy, business, research and for society.
This international event will connect project partners, including data and environmental researchers, public and private sector developers, EU decision- and policymakers, representatives from global institutions, the business sector and civil society to discuss and test solutions to the greatest challenges in geospatial applications.
Through five days featuring international keynote speakers, scientific presentations, discussions, and demonstrative workshops, the participants of the OEMC Global Workshop 2023 will explore valuable opportunities and establish tangible collaborations to improve geospatial research and application products in open-source.
Visit the official page

Open Earth Observation and Machine Learning technology to support the European Green Deal

Earth Observations and geospatial data —and their derived information— play crucial roles in monitoring regional, national and global environmental and climate targets proposed by the ambitious European Green Deal. Practitioners and decision-makers are therefore in need of accessible, science-based tools for timely and informed decisions as well as for long-term planning, progress tracking and transparent evaluation processes.
Open-Earth-Monitor project’s main aim is to directly support the implementation of the European Green Deal, the European Digital Transition, the EuroGEO (Europe’s part of the Group on Earth Observations) and overall the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). How? By producing and integrating a range of open-source, data-based and user-friendly tools to monitor European and global environmental trends, and for ecosystem services accounting in constant collaboration with user communities.

Call for abstracts

Workshops

If you have developed (or are in the process of developing) a free and open-source project and product related to EO and other geospatial technologies that could support decision-making and the achievement of the EU Green Deal, or are part of a similar project, we invite you to participate by sending your proposal for a workshop. This will be an occasion to present, discuss and gather feedback directly from potential users of your products, making tools and data more accessible and usable.

Oral presentations and posters

The Open-Earth-Monitor Global Workshop 2023 aims to become one of the flagship events for the open-source geospatial community in Europe. While the focus of the workshops is open-source software and methods in support of European policies and decision-making, we wish to provide a stage to a broader variety of knowledge and experiences, where new methods, tools and approaches are shared and novel collaborations are established.
Some of the expected topics will be the research and application of geospatial technologies in various fields including governance, industries and in the public sector. We will focus also on the role of user communities and businesses in research and advancements in the open-source EO and Machine Learning technologies to achieve both digital and green transitions.
Deadline: 15th April 2023
Submit via Pretalx

International Data Week 2023 - A Festival of Data
2023-10-23 08:00 - 2023-10-26 17:00 (Europe/Paris) | University of Salzburg, Austria
The International Science Council’s Committee on Data (CODATA) and World Data System (WDS), and the Research Data Alliance (RDA) are organizing the International Data Week 2023: A Festival of Data, taking place on 23–26 October 2023, in Salzburg, Austria.
IDW 2023 will be hosted by the University of Salzburg through its interdisciplinary Data Science group and the Geoinformatics department, supported by the Governor of Salzburg and with assistance from the Austrian Academy of Sciences – GIScience and the European Umbrella Organization for Geographic Information.
International Data Week brings together a global community of data scientists and data stewards; researchers from all domains; data, interoperability and informatics experts from all fields; industry leaders, entrepreneurs and policymakers.
This event will be an inclusive and celebratory Festival of Data, with in-person and virtual components, highlighting the opportunities for the positive transformation of our world in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic and other global challenges.
IDW 2023 will combine the RDA Plenary Meeting, the biannual meeting of this international member organization working to develop and support global infrastructure facilitating data sharing and reuse, and SciDataCon 2023, the scientific conference addressing the frontiers of data in research organized by CODATA and WDS.

Open-Earth-Monitor Science Webinar - February 1st 2024
2024-02-01 14:00 - 15:00 | Online
Join us for the latest edition of the OEMC Science Webinars! Thursday 1st February, 2-3 PM (CET) on Zoom
The Open-Earth-Monitor project is pleased to invite you to the eleventh edition of the Science Webinars, our monthly discussions on topics related to earth observation and environmental monitoring, hosted on the first Thursday of each month.
Follow this link to register to the Zoom webinar and attend freely!
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#1: Exploring In-Situ Data: Definitions, Sources, and Training Applications
By Steffen Fritz, rogram Director of the Strategic Initiatives Program and principal research scholar in the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability (NODES) Research Group of the IIASA Advancing Systems Analysis Program
“In this session, a broad introduction to In-Situ Data and the definitions used will be given. It will provide an overview of authoritative and non-authoritative data sources, the importance of In-Situ Data for training remote sensing deep learning models (showcasing WorldCover and C-GLOPS training data sets, etc.), and other citizen science data (e.g. iNATURALIST etc.). Methods will also be discussed for how in-situ data can be extracted from Mapillay and Streetview.”
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#2: Crowdsourcing land cover and land use reference data using the Geo-Wiki application
By Linda See, principal research scholar in the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability (NODES) Research Group of the IIASA Advancing Systems Analysis Program
“This talk will provide a brief overview of the Geo-Wiki application for the collection of land cover and land use reference data using crowdsourcing and the visual interpretation of very high-resolution satellite imagery. These reference data have been used to create training data sets and to validate land cover/land use products in a range of different applications including cropland extent, forest management, and the drivers of deforestation, which will be presented in brief.”
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Do not miss the upcoming OEMC science webinar, on Thursday, February 1st, from 2 to 3 PM (CET)! Register here.
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Open-Earth-Monitor Science Webinar - March 14th 2024
2024-03-14 14:00 - 15:00 | Online
Join us for the latest edition of the OEMC Science Webinars! Thursday March 14th, 2-3 PM (CET) on Zoom
The Open-Earth-Monitor project is pleased to invite you to the 12th edition of the Science Webinars, our monthly discussions on topics related to earth observation and environmental monitoring, hosted on the first Thursday of each month.
Follow this link to register to the Zoom webinar and attend freely!

Towards a global standard in GHG flux observations
By Simone Sabbatini, Junior Researcher at the Euri-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC)
“Recent advancements in technology and increased understanding of scientific issues at a large scale have facilitated a broader perspective in numerous scientific studies, thereby presenting novel challenges. Standardization and harmonization have emerged as pivotal concepts across various aspects of ecological research, encompassing instrumentation, methodologies, data processing, quality, metadata. This talk will explore the evolution over the past three decades of in-situ measurements of greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes worldwide, from initial campaigns to the establishment of the FLUXNET community, to investigate the current challenges and the possible advancements in this field.”

Key aspects of the Copernicus satellite data management
By Dr. Jędrzej Bojanowski, lead of the Data Science in Earth Observation department at CloudFerro
“This talk will cover the key innovative aspects in Earth Observation data management introduced by the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem and its commercial component, CREODIAS. These aspects include access to entire archives of Copernicus satellite data with immediate online availability, a range of data access and processing APIs, mechanisms for tracing data product integrity, as well as tools for collaborative data analysis and visualization, and support for custom data processing workflows.”

Do not miss the upcoming OEMC science webinar, on Thursday, March 14th, from 2 to 3 PM (CET)! Register here.
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Science Webinar - 2nd May, 2024
2024-05-02 14:00 - 15:00
The Open-Earth-Monitor project is pleased to invite you to the 13th edition of the Science Webinars, starting this month with a new format focused on the project use cases. These talks and discussions will now be held once every two months and will host both use case leaders and stakeholders to discuss the project outputs and related outcomes.
Register now to attend the Zoom Webinar freely!
Join us to listen to the following presentations and ask experts your questions:
1) Unveiling the location of cocoa farms across the pan-tropics by Dr Robert Masolele, Post-doctoral researcher at Wageningen University (WUR)
Cocoa cultivation is a cornerstone of agricultural economies across the pan-tropical regions, supporting millions of livelihoods and contributing significantly to global cocoa production. However, accurately mapping cocoa farm locations remains difficult due to the complex and heterogeneous nature of tropical landscapes. To address this challenge, Dr Masolele and his team’s research aims to employ deep learning methodologies to unveil the locations of cocoa farms across the pan-tropics. Through this research effort, they aspire to provide valuable insights into cocoa farm locations, facilitating sustainable cocoa production practices, land management strategies, and conservation efforts across the pan-tropical forests, thus paving the way for informed decision-making.
2) The SERVIR program, from complex data to actionable information by Dr. Ate Poortinga, currently employed by the Spatial Informatics Group in the SERVIR-Mekong project in Bangkok
Over the past six years, Dr. Ate Poortinga has been actively involved with the SERVIR program, a collaboration between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and NASA. This program utilizes space technology, open data, and open science to address a wide range of environmental and development challenges. In his presentation, Dr. Poortinga will explain how SERVIR leverages data and science from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and academic institutions to transform complex data into actionable information. This information aids governments, academic institutions, civil society, and vulnerable communities in building resilience and promoting sustainable development.”
=> Register now to attend the Zoom Webinar freely!
=> Link to the invitation.

GEO-OPEN-HACK-2024: Big Geospatial Data Hackathon with Open Infrastructure and Tools
2024-06-24 - 2024-06-28 | IIASA, Schloßpl. 1, Laxenburg, 2361, Austria
Find out more on the official event page.

Co-developement sessions
2024-09-30 - 2024-10-01 | IIASA, Schloßpl. 1, Laxenburg, 2361, Austria
More information to come soon.

Global Workshop 2024
2024-10-02 - 2024-10-04 | Laxenburg Conference Center, Schloßpl. 1, Laxenburg, 2361, Austria
Jointly organized by OpenGeoHub foundation (OGH) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the Open-Earth-Monitor Global Workshop 2024 will bring together European and global actors in the field of open-source Earth Observation applications in policy, business, research and for society.
This international event will connect project partners, including data and environmental researchers, public and private sector developers, EU decision- and policymakers, representatives from global institutions, the business sector and civil society to discuss and test solutions to the greatest challenges in geospatial applications.
Through three days featuring international keynote speakers, oral presentations, poster presentations, and demonstrative workshops, the participants of the OEMC Global Workshop 2024 will explore valuable opportunities and establish tangible collaborations to improve geospatial research and application products in open-source.
Find out more: https://earthmonitor.org/global-workshop-2024/

Open-Earth-Monitor Science Webinar - May 8th 2025
2025-05-08 13:00 - 14:00 | Online
The case of forest monitoring using vegetation vigour evolution over phenological cycles
By Codrina Maria Ilie
Terrasigna
The opportunity provided by the Earth Observation programs to monitor forests across the globe has been taken very seriously by researchers, not-for-profit organisations, governments, as well as private companies in the last 7 decades and, as a result, the panoply of related EO based products and services has improved constantly and significantly. Given their prevalence, within the OpenEarthMonitor the team, in collaboration with the stakeholders, researched potential improvements that could be brought to the existing portfolio. In this context, we have defined a new, interesting and useful addition to the already known EO-based products for forest monitoring: the forest vegetation vigour.
The vegetation vigour (VV) product is a custom type of pixel-based index that characterises the vegetation during long periods of time, preferably during a complete phenological cycle, based on NDVI values. The product does not represent a snapshot of the vegetation, but it characterises its cumulative state over time. For each pixel, the VV is proportionally higher as the NDVI values are higher, over the entire analysed period. Thus, the VV can be used to qualitatively compare regions of classes of vegetation, over multiple phenological cycles.
Six sample regions have been chosen to address different forestry ecoregions, including shrubs to test the hypothesis that the new algorithm can be successfully used in regions with highly diverse types of vegetation. Also, there is high emphasis on the qualitative nature of the generated product and thus the requirement for a technical specialist to determine the thresholds with respect to the events identified within the product.
The data is available on zenodo.org, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14712961.
In this talk, the authors will showcase the utility of the vegetation vigour EO-based product, as well as its limitations.

Beyond the Canopy: Seeing the Forest from the Trees with UAV and Terrestrial Mobile LiDAR
By Mihai Daniel Nita 1,2
1 Department of Forest Engineering, Forest Management Planning and Terrestrial Measurements, Faculty of Silviculture and Forest Engineering, at Transilvania University of Brașov, Romania
2SC Forest Design SRL
Complex forest ecosystems, particularly those with multilayered canopies and dense understories, present persistent challenges for accurate and complete geo-spatial data collection. This presentation investigates how UAV-mounted LiDAR systems and terrestrial mobile LiDAR scanners can be combined to effectively penetrate forest canopies and map what lies beneath—enabling a comprehensive understanding of forest structure from canopy top to forest floor. Focusing on a case study from Carpathian Mountains, Romania, we present an integrated workflow that couples aerial LiDAR for upper-canopy characterization with mobile ground-based scanning for detailed reconstruction of tree stems, understory vegetation, and microtopography.
To bridge scales and extend insights beyond plot-level data, we integrate these terrestrial and UAV-derived point clouds with satellite-derived products, including canopy height models and forest cover maps from missions such as GEDI and Sentinel. This multi-source data fusion not only enhances vertical profiling of forests but also serves as a foundational layer for building and updating forest digital twins. We explore whether digital twinning in forestry is merely conceptual or already a practical reality—highlighting automated data processing workflows, calibration between sensor types, and implications for biomass estimation and ecosystem monitoring. The talk concludes with perspectives on scaling these approaches for regional forest assessments and supporting sustainable management under climate change scenarios.
Do not miss the upcoming OEMC science webinar, on Thursday, June 5th, from 2 to 3 PM (CET)! Register here.
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Open-Earth-Monitor Science Webinar - June 5th 2025
2025-06-05 14:00 - 15:00 | Online
Join us for the latest edition of the OEMC Science Webinars! Thursday March 14th, 2-3 PM (CET) on Zoom
The Open-Earth-Monitor project is pleased to invite you to the 12th edition of the Science Webinars, our monthly discussions on topics related to earth observation and environmental monitoring, hosted on the first Thursday of each month.
Follow this link to register to the Zoom webinar and attend freely!
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Discrete Global Grid Systems: Towards Less Distorted Geospatial Data
Satellite imagery is traditionally stored and processed on rectangular grids. However, the widespread usage of such grids has normalized their inherent distortions, particularly near the poles. Previous attempts to address this issue, such as employing multiple local projections like the UTM-based Sentinel 2 L1C grid, have led to inefficiencies, including a significant increase in data volume (~30%) due to overlaps that need to be stored, downloaded, and processed. Additionally, there is a lack of a unified global indexing system and the choice of pixel cell shape, which further complicate the analysis. In this talk, we advocate for a paradigm shift towards Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) to mitigate these challenges. DGGS tessellate the Earth’s surface with hierarchical cells of equal area, minimizing distortion and reducing loading time of large geospatial datasets. This approach would greatly improve spatial statistics and convolutional Machine Learning models, where accurate representation of global phenomena is paramount at a global scale. In particular, we present the Julia package DGGS.jl to work with DGGS native raster data cubes
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Global Workshop 2025
2025-09-17 - 2025-09-19 | Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering – University of Perugia in Italy, Via G. Duranti, 93, Perugia, 06125, Italy
The Open Earth Monitor — Global Workshop 2025 “Open EO data and open source software as a foundation for monitoring the European Green Deal”, the 4th global workshop of the Open Earth Monitor Project, will be held in Belgrade, Serbia. This workshop is co-organized by OpenGeoHub Foundation, Belgrad University, Department of Geoinformatics and Gilab.
During these 3 days workshop, we will host technical and application topics discussion around Open EO Data.
Find out more: https://earthmonitor.org/events/global-workshop-2025/

Open-Earth-Monitor Global Workshop 2026
2026-10-07 - 2026-10-09 | Casa de Convalescència, Carrer de Sant Antoni Maria Claret, 171, Horta-Guinardó, 08041, Barcelona, Spain
The final Open-Earth-Monitor Global Workshop is taking place 7–9 October 2026 in Barcelona, Spain, and is co-organized by OpenGeoHub Foundation and CREAF. This fifth and final edition will be a key milestone for the project, showcasing the OEMC’s final tools and results, while bringing together the global Earth Observation and open-source community around the theme: Next-Generation EO & GeoAI Built on Openness and Distributed Data. This public event will focus on showcasing the project’s final tools and outputs, fostering a dialogue on next-generation Earth Observation and GeoAI solutions built on openness, distributed data, and real-world user needs across policy, science, and industry.
With an impressive lineup that includes the Director of CREAF, experts from the German Aerospace Center, the World Resources Institute (WRI), the Netherlands Space Office, Cambridge University, Eurac Research, and more, we are bringing together some of the most renowned experts in EO data to present and discuss the latest developments in the field and the outputs of OEMC after a 4-year project.
To participate in the final workshop, please submit an abstract for an oral presentation, a workshop session, or a poster session. The science committee will review all proposals, and the best-ranked proposals will then be selected to be part of the program.

Event link: https://earthmonitor.org/global-workshop-2026/
Abstract Submission: https://pretalx.earthmonitor.org/global-workshop-2026/cfp
