Open-Earth-Monitor Global Workshop 2026

Earth observation is generating data at unprecedented scales, and new analytical methods offer powerful ways to extract insights from it. But realising this potential depends on the infrastructure beneath: how data is stored, accessed, and processed—and crucially, who builds and maintains that infrastructure. Openness is not just a technical preference. It is a practical strategy for sovereignty, a driver of innovation, and the foundation for communities that can sustain this work over the long term.
Openness for sovereignty: In the current political and economic climate, dependence on infrastructure that can become inaccessible, unaffordable, or restricted is a real risk. Proprietary platforms can change pricing, alter terms, or disappear entirely. The environmental research community works on challenges spanning decades—climate change, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation. The tools we build today must remain available and adaptable regardless of corporate decisions, funding changes, or geopolitical shifts. Open-source software and open standards provide this guarantee: there is no licence to be revoked, no single point of failure, no dependency on decisions made elsewhere.
Openness for innovation: When tools are open, anyone can extend them. New capabilities emerge because the need exists and the ecosystem allows it—no permission required, no vendor roadmap to wait for. xDGGS, which brings Discrete Global Grid Systems to the Python ecosystem, was built by contributors who saw a gap and filled it. Open standards like Zarr mean new tools can interoperate immediately, compounding each other's value. This is how innovation actually happens: not through proprietary development cycles, but through communities identifying problems and sharing solutions. The pace of improvement accelerates because every contribution benefits everyone.
Openness for sustainable communities: Software without a community is software with an expiration date. Open source survives because people can join, contribute, and take ownership. There are no gatekeepers deciding who gets to participate. When someone learns from the codebase, improves it, and teaches others, the community grows stronger. Initiatives like the Environmental Data Science Book, the Pangeo community meetings, and training programmes across Europe are not just about spreading knowledge—they are about ensuring that the next generation of researchers and developers can maintain and extend these tools. Shared ownership means shared responsibility, and that is what makes infrastructure last.
The Pangeo ecosystem: Pangeo embodies these principles. It provides the toolkit for scalable Earth science—Xarray for labelled arrays, Dask for distributed computing, Zarr for cloud-native storage, xDGGS for grid systems—built by a global community and available to all. Pangeo@EOSC, deployed on European infrastructure through collaboration between EGI and research institutions, demonstrates that this model works: open tools, running on open infrastructure, maintained by a community with shared stakes in its success.
Making data analysis-ready: Underlying this is the practical challenge of data. Most Earth observation data was not designed for modern workflows—it comes in heterogeneous formats, different projections, inconsistent resolutions. Discrete Global Grid Systems and cloud-optimised formats like Zarr address this by creating common frameworks where data is ready for use the moment it is published. These are open standards that anyone can implement and build upon.
What this talk will cover: Concrete examples of what Pangeo makes possible today, who is building these tools, and how openness enables sovereignty, accelerates innovation, and grows communities that last. The message is simple: open infrastructure is working, it is being built by people who believe in it, and there is room for more to join.