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Videos

The OEMC video repository is an online resource that shares open-access talks, webinars, and educational materials such as trainings sessions. This is an online learning environment that aims at sharing and disseminate OEMC’s discoveries and outputs for Earth Observation analysis, integration and applications.

The content is hosted by the TIB.Av Portal and is freely accessible for anyone around the globe.

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Open-Earth-Monitor science webinars

Every first Thursday of the month
Description:

The Open-Earth-Monitor project, funded by the EU Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, organizes monthly science webinar hosting two researchers working with Earth Observations, geospatial environmental data, monitoring networks and alert systems and their applications.

Martijn Witjes presented OpenGeoHub’s efforts at creating a harmonized, multi-source spatiotemporal data cube for Europe, and how this data cube was used to produce consistent continental annual land use/ land cover maps. He also showed around the EcoDataCube platform that hosts the data cube and the land cover maps!
Joaquin van Peborgh is Director of Product at OpenEarth Foundation. During the Open-Earth-Monitor Science Webinar, Joaquin showcased the OpenClimate platform, the data schema and data aggregation work done, and its roadmap and opportunities of collaboration for the open source and open data community.
Quentin Groom is the lead of the Biodiversity Informatics team at Meise Botanic Garden in Belgium. In this presentation, Quentin wanted to give attendees a sense of biodiversity data, where it comes from, what they want to learn from it, and what the challenges are. He did this in the context of the B-Cubed project (https://doi.org/10.3030/101059592) that aims to contribute to solving some of these challenges and made particular reference to citizen science for the collection of data and the advantages and challenges this presents.
Paolo Filippucci (PhD) is a research fellow at the Hydrology group of the Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection (IRPI) of Italian National Research Council (CNR). He presented a methodology to derive river discharge information from near-infrared (NIR) satellite sensors. The approach has been applied to different river basins worldwide in the framework of the ESA projects RIDESAT, STREAMRIDE, HYDROCOASTAL and 4DMED-hydrology, by using NIR data sensed by MODIS and Sentinel-2 sensors.
Peter A. Strobl is a Senior Scientist at European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy. In this presentation, he gave an overview of the development of CEOS-ARD, its current status, and provided an outlook on the next steps in CEOS-ARD and the OGC SWG.
Dr. Joan Masó (m) is a Principal investigator of CREAF leading specialized group on geospatial interoperability, GIS, remote sensing. In this presentation, Joan showed that in order to make sense of sensor data, a data model that semantically tags the data is needed. Sensor Things API helps to map “data columns” to concepts (time, observed property, location, etc.), making the data machine-readable, and as a bonus, this structured API has rich query capabilities.
Florian Franziskakis has been working at the GEO Secretariat since 2019 where he was involved in the technical development of the GEO Knowledge Hub, and is now coordinating in situ related activities in GEO. During the OEMC Science Webinar, he showcased the community needs in terms of in situ data (collected from automated sensors, ground measurements in various thematic areas remains), following an inventory that was done with 28 activities from the GEO Work Programme.
Today European scale research projects are not only limited to collaborative scientific advancements. They require joint cross-border, interdisciplinary development and operationalization of results following the principles of open source and FAIR data. The ADO Project is led by Eurac Research and relies on collaboration within research institutes of six alpine countries for creating a scientifically sound operational drought information web platform aiding decision makers on an alpine to regional level in managing water resources and drought impacts. The ADO web platform feeds on big data satellite and climate archives on the input side and shows curated drought information through an interactive web platform for stakeholders and decision makers. The presentation will guide through the concepts, operational maintenance and update and show the web platform in action.
InBestSoil is a research and innovation action funded under the call: Incentives and business models for soil health. The idea behind this project is to translate into monetary values the interventions that we make to improve the soil quality, as well as the ecosystem services provided by healthy soils. The project is going to be developed around nine case studies spread across Europe: three living labs and six lighthouses. For the economic valuation, we will combine Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA). On the one hand, the LCA is going to focus on the positive and negative impacts of producing healthy soils, i.e., the interventions used to improve soils. The results of the LCA will be one of the inputs to the CBA. For the CBA, the costs and benefits derived from ecosystem services will also be considered. And this valuation of ecosystem services will be made considering market values calculated directly; and non-market values, which will be determined through preference methods (contingent valuation or choice experiment) and benefit transfer methodologies.
Edzer Pebesma leads the spatiotemporal modeling lab at the Institute for Geoinformatics of the University of Münster. The presentation he did was about discussing the concept of data cubes, cloud computing, and why openEO is a good idea to use for computing on large data cubes. It also discussed how machine learning and deep learning work, and showed how these methods can be applied to data cubes using openEO (which is a work in progress, really).

Expert interviews

Description:

Who is behind the science? We ask researchers to share their stories and opinions about the their work and potential implications.

Martijn Witjes is a PhD candidate at OpenGeohub Foundation, focusing on large-scale spatiotemporal land cover modeling. Following his presentation, he was asked a few questions by OEMC’s Working Package 8 OpenGeoHub’s communication experts.

Joaquin van Peborgh is Director of Product at OpenEarth Foundation. Following his presentation, he was asked a few questions by OEMC’s Working Package 8 OpenGeoHub’s communication experts.

Quentin Groom is the lead of the Biodiversity Informatics team at Meise Botanic Garden in Belgium, and part of the B-cubed project. Following his presentation, he was asked a few questions by OEMC’s Working Package 8 OpenGeoHub’s communication experts.
Paolo Filippucci (PhD) is a research fellow at the Hydrology group of the Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection (IRPI) of Italian National Research Council (CNR). Following this presentation, he was asked a few questions by OEMC’s Working Package 8 OpenGeoHub’s communication experts.
Peter A. Strobl is a Senior Scientist at European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy. Following his presentation, he was asked a few questions by OEMC’s Working Package 8 OpenGeoHub’s communication experts.
Dr. Joan Masó (m) is a Principal investigator of CREAF leading specialized group on geospatial interoperability, GIS, remote sensing. Following his presentation, he was asked a few questions by OEMC’s Working Package 8 OpenGeoHub’s communication experts.
Florian Franziskakis has been working at the GEO Secretariat since 2019 where he was involved in the technical development of the GEO Knowledge Hub, and is now coordinating in situ related activities in GEO. Following his presentation, he was asked a few questions by OEMC’s Working Package 8 OpenGeoHub’s communication experts.
Dr. Diego Soto Gómez is a postdoctoral researcher in the field of soil science, with expertise in areas such as soil physics and microbiology, tomography, image analysis and hydrology. Currently, he conducts his research at the University of Vigo (UVigo). Following his presentation, he was asked a few questions by OEMC’s Working Package 8 OpenGeoHub’s communication experts.
Peter Zellner is a geographer with a focus on geoinformatics, remote sensing and their application to environmental topics. Adhering to openness in research, data and software, he is involved with the ADO Project (Alpine Drought Observatory), led by Eurac Research. Following his presentation, he was asked a few questions by OEMC’s Working Package 8 OpenGeoHub’s communication experts.
Edzer Pebesma leads the spatiotemporal modelling lab at the Institute for Geoinformatics of the University of Münster. He is author of the book “Spatial Data Science: With applications in R” which appeared in May this year in print and is entirely available online on https://r-spatial.org/book/. Edzer is one of the initiators of openEO, a fresh approach to working with Earth observation data cubes in the cloud, and is an active contributor to the R-spatial community. Following this presentation, he was asked a few questions by OEMC’s Working Package 8 OpenGeoHub’s communication experts.

Present and Future of Data Cubes

Date: 7 December 2022
Description:

The Open-Earth-Monitor project organized a workshop on state-of-the-art Data Cube solutions, what is missing and how to prepare for the future during the EuroGEO workshop 2022. The objectives were to review existing top-level solutions to organize large EO data, share and enable researchers and organizations to make use of it for applied purposes; understand which Open Source solutions provide cutting-edge functionality to process EO data and how to make EO data processing more transparent and more reproducible;  Moderators: Tom Hengl and Carson Ross (OpenGeoHub).

ENVISION develops and pilot tests innovative tools for the continuous, large scale and uninterrupted monitoring of farm management activities with regard to sustainability, in compliance with the CAP's agri-environmental objectives. At the workshop organized by the Open-Earth-Monitor project in Athens during the EuroGEO 2022, Thanassis Drivas from the National Observatory of Athens (NOA) presented the ENVISION Data Cube for Big Satellite Image Time-Series to support AI-based national-scale agriculture Monitoring.

The EcoDataCube is an Open Data Portal, a freely-accessible viewer containing gridded layers for Europe at spatial resolutions of 30-m or more. The maps are produced using FOSS4G software solutions, Machine Learning and Open Earth Observation data. The Open Environmental Data Cube for Europe data aim at serving decision-ready layers such as land cover, air quality and pollution, potential natural vegetation and similar and it was part of the Geo-Harmonizer project that ended in 2022. At the workshop organized by the Open-Earth-Monitor project in Athens during the EuroGEO 2022, Leandro Parente from the OpenGeoHub foundation presented the EcoDataCube.eu

AD4GD’s mission is to co-create and shape the European Green Deal Data Space as an open hub for FAIR data and standards-based services that support the key priorities of pollution, biodiversity and climate change. The focus will be on interoperability concepts that bridge the semantic and technology gaps which currently prevent stakeholders and application domains from multi-disciplinary and multi-scale access to data, and which impede the exploitation of processing services, and processing platforms at different levels including Cloud, HPC and edge computing. Joan Maso from Centre de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals (CREAF) showed the AD4GD project at the workshop organized by the Open-Earth-Monitor project in Athens, during the EuroGEO Workshop 2022.

B3 (B-cubed) stays for Biodiversity Building Blocks for policy and it is an upcoming Horizon Europe project that will use the concept of data cubes to simplify and standardize access to biodiversity data using the Essential Biodiversity Variables framework. These cubes will be used, in conjunction with other environmental data and scenarios, as the basis for models and indicators of past, current and future biodiversity. The overarching goal of the project is to provide easy access to tools in a cloud computing environment, in real-time and on-demand, with state-of-the-art prediction models of biodiversity, that will output models and indicators of biodiversity status and change. At the workshop organized by the Open-Earth-Monitor project in Athens during the EuroGEO 2022, Quentin Groom from the Plantentuin Meise presented the B3 project.

F.A.I.R. Information Cubes – FAIRiCUBE aims to enable players from beyond classic Earth Observation (EO) domains to provide, access, process, and share gridded data and algorithms in a FAIR and TRUSTable manner. This project’s goal is to leverage the power of Machine Learning (ML) operating on multi-thematic datacubes for a broader range of governance and research institutions from diverse fields, which at present cannot easily access and utilize these potent resources. At the workshop organized by the Open-Earth-Monitor project in Athens during the EuroGEO 2022, Stefan Jetschny from the Norwegian Institute for Air Research presented the FAIRiCUBE.

HARMONIA will provide a resilience assessment platform to help urban stakeholders understand and quantify Climate Change effects. Based on satellite and auxiliary data, the HARMONIA platform will offer a user-friendly knowledge base, dispensing detailed information on a local neighbourhood and street level. This will support local decision-making and foster a wide range of applications dedicated to climate adaptation and mitigation, such as Carbon Capture and Storage technologies. At the workshop hosted by the Open-Earth-Monitor project during the EuroGEO 2022, Anastasios Temenos from the National Technical University of Athens, presented this H2020-funded project.

Upcoming

OEMC Kick-off

Date: 15 Apr 2022
Description:

The mission of the Open-Earth-Monitor project consortium is to significantly accelerate the uptake of environmental information to guide current and future users in research, decision-making and citizens toward the most sustainable solutions. The consortium organized a public launch event in Wageningen on July 19th, 2022 to present the OEMC missions, activities, outputs and outstanding partners of the Open-Earth-Monitor project.

Tom Hengl, co-founder and technical director at OpenGeoHub foundation, introduced the Open-Earth-Monitor project and illustrated its missions, goals and activities at the 'Innovative governance, environmental observations and digital solutions in support of the European Green Deal’ workshop held in Wageningen (NL) on July 19th.
Jean Dusart is a policy officer at the European Commission DG Research & Innovation. At the OEMC project kick-off, Jean explored how the novel Open-Earth-Monitor project can support the twin transitions, namely the ‘green transition’ upheld by the European Green Deal, and the ‘digital transition’ promoted by the European Data Strategy.

Erwin Goor, Project Officer for Environmental Observation at the European Commission’s European Research Executive Agency introduced the audience to another ambitious European Data initiative, the European Group on Earth Observation (EuroGEO): since 2017, it operates as an incubator to produce, deliver, promote, and scale EO services and applications in association with Copernicus programme, European countries and most importantly with users.

Ichsani is responsible for business development and development and use of Open data sets at OpenGeoHub foundation. Ichsani is agricultural land and water restoration, natural resource monitoring, soil carbon methodologies specialist. In this talk, Ichsani highlighted the gaps and reasons to achieve environmental data governance, and how the Open-Earth-Monitor project intends to encourage this process.

Gert-Jan Nabuurs is professor European forest resources at Wageningen University and Research. His expertise is European scale forest resource analyses, carbon sequestration under climate change. He is IPCC Coordinating lead Author in the Sixth Assessment Report for Agriculture and Forestry. In this talk, Gert-Jan shared his long-standing experiences in gathering
Patrick Griffiths is a Earth Observation Data Engineer at European Space Agency – ESA, based in Italy. At the Open-Earth-Monitor kick-off, Patrick introduced the data management burden affecting scientists, particularly in the EO space, exploring possible solutions and semplifications paths – as shown by the EuroData Cube and OpenEO Platform initiatives.


Stathes Hadjiefthymiades is a professor in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens. Stathes presented the novel Horizon-Europe project ‘EO4EU’ which aims at making Earth Observation (EO) data more accessible by providing an AI-augmented ecosystem with improved user interfaces for EO service and data powered by extended reality. EO4EU and OEMC are sister projects and will collaborate on multiple grounds in the coming years.

Joanna Ruiter is an Advisor Satellite Applications at NSO - the Netherlands Space Office. At the Open-Earth-Monitor kick-off, Joan discussed the importance of tracking impacts of environmental investments, making sure that funds are spent efficiently.