2026-10-07, 11:00–11:30 (Europe/Amsterdam), Aula Magna
Healthy soils are an indispensable natural resource providing many ecosystem services, such as producing biomass to secure our food supply, storing large amounts of carbon – a higher amount with respect to forests worldwide – storing and purifying our drinking water, and providing a habitat for a variety of organisms. At the same time, soils are a limited, non-renewable and irreplaceable natural resource.
In this context, the EU Soil Strategy for 2030 outlines the path to healthy soils in Europe by 2050 through
voluntary and legislative measures by Member States, leading to the approval of the Soil Monitoring Law
in 2025. Member States are carrying out a variety of activities to activate their existing expertise in soil
monitoring and promote technologies such as optical and SAR remote sensing, to be used in this frame.
Currently, there are several initiatives and projects that explore the potential of Earth Observation for soil
mapping and monitoring for large areas. This will open the path to establish an operational service for soil information that could be available for the public, such as the ones provided in the frame of Copernicus Land Monitoring Service. In this talk, we address the opportunities and challenges of mapping soils with
optical Earth Observation including spaceborne imaging spectroscopy and try to answer the following
questions: Which technological developments have been achieved in the last decades? What steps are
necessary to establish a robust Earth observation-based monitoring system for soils? And especially, how can the imaging spectroscopy community contribute to this process?
The talk presents the demand for soil-related information, which, depending on the application, must fulfil various spatial and temporal requirements, as well as a specific level of detail. One of the major
challenges is developing methods and techniques that can handle the heterogeneous regional
characteristics of the landscape. We present examples of regionalized models for temporal bare soil
compositing in Europe to be used as an important input data set (Karlshoefer et al., 2025) and local
ensemble models for soil organic carbon estimation in Germany (Broeg et al., 2024). Another challenge
involves the coverage and repetition of imaging spectroscopy data, as monitoring soil erosion requires
frequent updates on vegetation coverage. In such cases, using multispectral and hyperspectral data in
combination with deep learning algorithms to obtain sub-pixel information about vegetation cover (i.e.,
fractional vegetation cover) is promising (Schwind et al., 2024). Finally, estimating the accuracy and
uncertainty of information products, especially those covering large areas remains challenging. Often,
validation data is scarce and unsuitable for the accuracy assessments of large areas. We discuss various
strategies of assessing accuracy, such as producing pixel-wise uncertainty maps (Ochoa et al., 2025),
evaluating the mapping methods itself (Karlshoefer et al., 2025) and developing UAV-based strategies
with high transferability potential.
The described strategies address the typical challenges of processing large areas, such as countries or
continents, which include regional differences and data scarcity. It is crucial to expand the scientific scope in order to overcome these challenges and provide frequent, accurate and reliable soil data for
extensive regions.
Dr. Uta Heiden brings over 20 years of expertise in airborne and spaceborne imaging spectroscopy. Her current work centers on using imaging spectroscopy and multispectral data archives to extract information on soils and soil–vegetation cover, with applications ranging from soil erosion assessment to soil property mapping. A key focus of her research is exploring sensor synergies — especially the integration of imaging spectroscopy — to enable large-scale, frequent monitoring of soil systems. She is a senior scientist at the Remote Sensing Technology Institute of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and she also serves as Science Coordinator for the hyperspectral DESIS mission and as a member of the EnMAP Science Advisory Group. In recognition of her longstanding contributions to the community, she has been honored with, for example, the prestigious IEEE Senior Member status and she holds the senior scientist status of the German Aerospace Center.