Open-Earth-Monitor project

Open-Earth-Monitor Science Webinar - May 8th 2025
2025-05-08 13:00 - 14:00 (Europe/Paris) | 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
