Open Earth Monitor — Global Workshop 2023

Alessandro Scremin has a Degree in Forestry and Environmental Management with focus on natural hazards management and mitigation. In the last 15 years he carried on R&D Project management activities in the field of Earth observation applications development for environmental monitoring within the following main sectors: Forestry, Natural hazards, citizen science, renewable energy and digital platform developments on Climate change mitigation.

Currently he is supporting ESA in coordinating several initiatives: the H2020 GPP (GEOSS Platform Plus) project, GTIF (Green Transition Information Factories) project, the European ESA-EC (RACE) dashboard and Trilateral (ESA-NASA-JAXA collaboration) Dashboard.

Earth Observation, Open Science, Digital Innovation

Arnan Araza has a background as a spatial modeller for ecosystem accounting since 2016 working mostly in water and carbon ecosystem accounting using Earth Observation data and machine learning. He was/has been involved in different ecosystem accounting projects like the World Bank-funded projects Phil-WAVES and ProFor and EU-funded projects such as MAIA, SELINA and currently Open Earth Monitor Project. He is a graduate of MSc and PhD Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing.

Dr Candan Eylül Kilsedar has a background in computer science and engineering and has specialized in remote sensing and geographic information systems. She worked as a research fellow from 2015 to 2020 at Politecnico di Milano and since 2020 she is working as a consultant at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, currently in the Knowledge Centre on Earth Observation (KCEO) team.

Carmelo has a MSc in forest systems sciences and technologies, with a specialization in forest resources monitoring and management through geospatial data science applications and time series analysis.
Carmelo is a PhD Candidate at Wageningen University and Research (WUR) in the Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing and works as a Research assistant at the OpenGeoHub Foundation

I'm a community ecologist with a PhD in plant-pollinator interactions. Recently, I've become interested in using the vast amounts of data available from satellites to develop tools to monitor biodiversity in supply chains and hopefully incentivize it's protection.

Codrina Ilie is a technical geographer, an open source GIS/RS power user, actively working in improving open data services development at Terrasigna. In her 12 years of activity, Codrina has essentially focused on using open source GIS and RS solutions for data management, processing and visualization. As an advocate for foss4g, since 2010 she has been a volunteer trainer in the Romanian geospatial community, geo-spatial.org. Since 2013, Codrina has been a Charter Member and today serves the geospatial community as an OSGeo Board of Directors member, within her second term.

I am a former physicist, trying to create order in the world of taxonomy and alike. He does so by writing elegant software functions to help you speed up your research.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3445-7562

Doctoral Researcher

Department Biogeochemical Integration (BGI)

Atmosphere-Biosphere Coupling, Climate and Causality

Ecosystem Function from Earth Observation

Intern. Max Planck Research School for Global Biogeochemical Cycles (IMPRS-gBGC)

2023 - today Data Scientist and PostDoc, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
2018 - 2023 Doctoral researcher Bioinformatics, Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology
2015 - 2017 Master Bioinformatics, Friedrich Schiller University Jena
2012 - 2015 Bachelor Molecular Life Science, University of Lubeck

Daniele Marinelli received the “Laurea” (B.Sc.) degree in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering, the “Laurea Magistrale” (M.Sc.) degree in Telecommunications Engineering (cum laude) and the Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technologies (cum laude) from the University of Trento, Italy, in 2013, 2015, 2019, respectively. He is recipient of the prize for the 2015 Best Italian master Thesis in the area of remote sensing awarded by the the Italy Chapter of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. He got the Second Place in the Student Paper Competition at the 2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2018) hold in Valencia (Spain). In 2017 he was a visiting PhD student at the Integrated Remote Sensing Studio, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada working on Change Detection in LiDAR data. From 2017 to 2022 he was a teaching assistant at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Trento. Currently he is a researcher at the Forest Ecology Unit of Fondazione Edmund Mach. His research interests are related to the multitemporal analysis time-series, Hyperspectral and LiDAR data for forestry applications.

I'm currently a PhD student at the Forest Ecology Group at the Research and Innovation Centre of the Edmund Mach Foundation (Italy), with a focus on grassland ecology and remote sensing. My background is in forestry and environmental sciences, biodiversity conservation, seed science and grassland restoration. My research now focuses on the integration of images (satellite and time-lapse camera) and field surveys to understand grassland ecological change.

Dominik Weckmüller is a data scientist at the Knowledge Centre on Earth Observation of the European Commission.
He develops innovative solutions for large-scale data analysis by utilizing advanced NLP machine learning methodologies to support EU policy-making.

Edzer Pebesma leads the spatio-temporal modelling laboratory at the institute for geoinformatics, and is currently head of institute. He holds a PhD in geosciences, and is interested in spatial statistics, environmental modelling, geoinformatics and GI Science, optimizing environmental monitoring, but also in e-Science and reproducible research. He is an ordinary member of the R foundation and is one of the authors of the freely online book "Spatial Data Science: With applications in R".

Fabian Gans is a project group leader at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. For the last 10 years he has been working as a Research software engineer and dealing with data cubes from a variety of sources and ever growing in size. He is excited about the Julia Programming language, and is creator/maintainer/comtributor in several Julia packages for geospatial data analysis.

Felipe Carlos is a master's degree in Applied Computing on Reproducible Earth Observation Science from Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE), with experience in web development (Python and ReactJS) and cloud infrastructure. Felipe also has experience processing, manipulating, and managing spatio-temporal data (data cubes, image time-series) in R and Python programming languages.

Currently, Felipe is a GEO Knowledge Hub team member, collaborating in the development of the digital library and its various modules.

Felix Cremer received his diploma in mathematics from the University of Leipzig in 2014. In 2016 he started his PhD study on time series analysis of hypertemporal Sentinel-1 radar data.
He is interested in the use of irregular time series tools on Synthetic Aperture Radar data to derive more robust information from these data sets.
He worked on the development of deforestation mapping algorithms and on flood mapping in the amazon using Sentinel-1 data.
He currently works at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry on the development of the JuliaDataCubes ecosystem in the scope of the NFDI4Earth project. The JuliaDataCubes organisation provides easy to use interfaces for the use of multi dimensional raster data.

I completed my Bachelor's degree in Physical Geography in Hanover and my Master's degree in Geoinformation Technologies in Dresden, Germany. Currently, I am working as a researcher at the Thünen Institute of Farm Economics and pursuing a PhD in the Earth Observation Lab at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. My main area of interest is in monitoring agricultural practices and management that have direct and indirect effects on climate. My research methods primarily involve analyzing time series data derived from satellite remote sensing, with a particular focus on combining the strengths of optical and radar sensors.

Researcher on Geoinformatics, Land Use Change and Spatial Data Science. Former Director of INPE/Brazil (2005-12) and of Group on Earth Observations (2018-21).

Gregory Duveiller is a project group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena. His research focuses on investigation ecosystem function and land-atmosphere interactions from satellite Earth Observation.

Gunnar Brandt hold a PhD in Environmental Sciences and works for Brockmann Consult GmbH as Prject Manager and Business Developer.

Geospatial Analyst

I have a background in European Studies (BSc) and Environmental Change and Sustainability (MSc), and I am currently working as a consultant to support the work of the European Commission Joint Research Centre - Knowledge Centre on Earth Observation (KCEO) hosted within the D.6 Unit - Nature Conservation and Observations. I provide technical support to the KCEO in developing thematic assessments (i.e., KCEO deep dives) to analyse how EO could better support EU policies in selected policy domains, including for instance biodiversity and climate adaptation.

Earth observation data engineer at ESA/ESRIN, responsible of DestinE's platform implementation.

Dr Jędrzej Bojanowski leads the Data Science department at CloudFerro, a company providing cloud computing infrastructures and EO data repositories such as CREODIAS. He specializes in application of satellite data in environmental studies: climatology and monitoring of agriculture. He received a PhD degree in 2014 from the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation of the University of Twente. He gained further experience as an employee of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (Ispra, Italy), a postdoctoral fellow of the Swiss Federal Institute for Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss) in Zurich and assistant professor and a deputy head of Remote Sensing Centre of the Institute of Geodesy and Cartography in Warsaw, Poland. He carried out ESA- and EUMETSAT-funded projects aiming at generation of ECVs of cloud physical properties from polar-orbiting and geostationary satellites. He was also a principal investigator of ESA projects related to satellite identification and monitoring of agricultural crops for public administration. He received an award of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education for Outstanding Young Scientists.

Dr. Joan Masó (m) is a Principal investigator of CREAF leading specialized group on geospatial interoperability, GIS, remote sensing . (PhD in Geography, MSc in Physics, and a MSc in Electronic Engineering all in the UAB). Since 1995 he is a researcher at CREAF and GIS developer. Co-creator of the MiraMon compressed map in 1997 that has evolved into a distribution and preservation format. Teacher in a RS and GIS master in the UAB. Creator of Remote Sensing imagery visualization and download software for web data portals (the MiraMon Map Browser). Expert in JPEG2000 format. He is an active member of the TC of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) since 2003 (editor OGC 07- 057r7 WMTS standard and the new OGC 20-057 OGC API Tiles among others and chair of the Iberian and Latin American Forum; ILAF). Spanish representative in the TC 211 and editor of the ISO 19165 Preservation of geospatial data and metadata. OGC Gardels gold medal in 2018. Coordinator of GeoViQua FP7 project (research project about visualization of quality information in GEOSS), H2020 ConnectinGeo and currently HE AD4GD. Participant in several European projects related with biodiversity, citizen science, remote sensing and research infrastructures such as H2020 ECOPOTENTIAL, H2020 GroundTruth 2.0, H2020 WeObserve H2020 ERA-PLANET, H2020 E-Shape, H2020 BestMap, H2020 COS4Cloud (INTRAEOSC project), ESA-IHE Phenotandem, EEA InCASE, OEMC as well as some other national and local projects related both with remote sensing and geospatial standards and applications. Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) former division president in the European Geosciences Union (EGU). Chair of the OGC API Common, OGC API Tiles and OGC API Maps working groups and member of the OGC Architecture Board. Co-chair of the Citizens Science GEOSS working group. Senior member of IEEE and member of the International Society of Digital Earth (ISDE) council. Chair of the Community of Practice in Interoperability for Citizen Science.

Director of Product at OpenEarth Foundation

Julia is a PhD candidate and research assistant at OpenGeoHub foundation, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on mapping land potential and monitoring land degradation using earth observation data.

Julia Wagemann (PhD) is an independent consultant in the Earth Observation domain who works across strategy, user engagement and training of Big Earth Data and cloud-based services. Her work is in the intersection between data providers and users aiming to make large volumes of Earth data better accessible and used. For the past four years, she has trained more than 1600 Earth Observation and climate practitioners. Prior to her consulting work, she has worked for the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

In 2022, she received her PhD from the University of Marburg. In her doctoral research, she started a new research field which aims to better understand users of Big Earth data and cloud-based services and their training needs.

She initiated and co-founded the professional network Women+ in Geospatial to make the geospatial community more diverse and equal. Since 2019, the network has grown to a global community of more than 4600 women+ in the geospatial domain.

Postdoctoral researcher at CREAF. Participant in H2020 and HE INFRA-EOSC projects: Cos4Cloud, ESOC Focus, AquaINFRA. Member of the EGU Earth and Space Science Informatics Division.

Senior Researcher at OpengeoHub

OpenGeoHub senior researcher

Lindsey Sloat is a Research Associate with the World Resources Institute's Land and Carbon Lab. She focuses on global monitoring data for agricultural lands - including both croplands and grazing lands - and applying those data to inform land use, land management, and environmental impact under a changing climate.

Researcher on forest dynamics, geospatial data, algorithms, scientific programming, etc... at European Commission's Joint Research Center, Ispra, Italy.

Luca Brocca received the Master and the PhD degree in Civil Engineering in 2003 and 2008, respectively. Since (2009) 2019 he is (Researcher) Director of Research at National Research Council, Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection of (CNR-IRPI) in Perugia. Luca Brocca is author and co-author of 180+ journal referred papers, his work has been cited 14600+ time, with H-index=64 with Google Scholar. Luca Brocca actively participates as Principal Investigator (PI) and co-PI to several research projects in the frame of Italian and European programs (LIFE+, HORIZON2020), and funded by International Space Agencies (ESA; EUMETSAT, and NASA). Among others, in 2012, he received the “Early Career Research Excellence” award by iEMSs society, in 2018 he has been the winner of the Copernicus Masters competition “BayWa Smart Farming Challenge”, in 2019 and 2020 he has been nominated “Highly Cited Researchers” by Web of Science Group – Clarivate, and in 2021 he won the ESA–EGU Earth Observation Excellence Award.
The main research interest of Luca Brocca lies in the development of innovative methods for exploiting satellite observations for hydrological applications (floods, landslides, rainfall, droughts, and irrigation). He developed the algorithm SM2RAIN, a novel concept for estimating rainfall from soil moisture observations.
More information at: http://hydrology.irpi.cnr.it/people/luca-brocca

Passionate about algorithm design and development, I have 15 years of experience in the field of data elaboration, analysis and visualization, in particular of data with a spatial / geographical component.
Over time I have worked in various fields, including climate modeling, intelligent transportation systems and earth observation, and I am currently developing data-related services for smart cities in the domains of energy efficiency of buildings, sustainable mobility and environmental management.
I am always looking for opportunities to apply my skills in challenging and innovative contexts, to work on solutions that have an impact on everyday life. I love international, multicultural work environments and cherish any opportunity to travel for work.

Martijn is a PhD student and research assistant at OpenGeoHub. His main focus is mapping land use and land cover with many classes, but he occasionally fills in as BBQ organizer, game show host, chauffeur, cable hunter, and board game consultant.

Milutin Milenković is a Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied System Analysis,
Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Group, Austria.

Nora Meyer zu Erpen studied geography and has been working in satellite-based earth observation for more than 15 years. After 11 years in industry, she moved to the German Research Center for Geoscience in January 2021, where she works in EO technology and knowledge transfer. Since June 2022, she also supports the stakeholder engagement strategy of the Open Earth Monitor project.

Patric is a sustainability scientist (PhD) working at the Institute for Crop and Soil Science being part of the Julius Kühn Institute - the German Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants. He is leading research on model-based crop yield estimation at the Institute’s Research Centre for Agricultural Remote Sensing leveraging the power of earth observation and geospatial analytics.

I am an Earth Observation Scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA), based in ESRIN, Italy. My main expertise is in developing analytical methods applied to large EO data volumes and time series in the context of land application domains. At ESA, a good part my work focusses on cloud-based enabling technologies that help abstracting underlying complexities when working with large EO data archives. Some of my activities also involve machine learning and dedicated tools that make working with these methods more efficient. I also continue working on vegetation phenology and biomass in rangeland/grassland ecosystems utilizing the synergies offered by the Sentinel missions.

Peter A. Strobl is a Senior Scientist at European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy. He graduated with an MSc in Geophysics (1991) from the University of Munich, and holds a Ph.D. (2000) in Remote Sensing from the University of Potsdam. His main working area concerns the overall data architecture of the Copernicus Earth Observation programme, including the definition of standards, quality metrics and references for geospatial data. He is a member of various international working groups and advisory panels, including the NASA/USGS Landsat Science Team and the EC/ESA Sentinel-2 Quality Working Group, the Copernicus CHIME Mission Advisory Group, co-chair of the OGC Domain Working Group on Digital Global Grid Systems and of the CEOS Land Surface Imaging Virtual Constellation, and chair of the CEOS-WGCV Terrain Mapping Sub-Group.

I'm a geographer with a focus on geoinformatics, remote sensing and their application to environmental applications - which should be barrierfree and open source.
Providing, optimizing and automizing remote sensing and gis workflows and tools.
Setting up scalable computing environments.
Working on big earth observation data cloud infrasturctures.
Helping to bring research results into an easily accessible and digestible format.

Geospatial data analyst at 3DOM research unit, FBK Trento, Italy
https://3dom.fbk.eu/people/profile/beber

Robert Masolele is a post-doctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing of Wageningen University, working on large-scale forest dynamics and driver monitoring. He exploits the advancement in earth observation and artificial intelligence to enable the detection of spatial patterns in environmental data based on satellite images. Robert holds a PhD in remote sensing and deep learning from Wageningen University, a Master of Science degree in Geo-information Science and Earth Observation from the Faculty of Geo-information science and earth observation of the University of Twente, and a Bachelor of Science in Forestry from Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania. He also has +3 years of experience working in forest resource assessment and conservation for the Tanzanian Forest Service. He enjoys carefully thinking about the highly mathematical parts of analyzing natural resource problems, particularly land use characterization and land use dynamics assessment, with the application of spatial statistical modeling, machine learning, and deep learning algorithms.

Simone Sabbatini has a PhD in Forest Ecology, obtained in 2014 at the DIBAF department of the University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy. His background consists in a BSC in Forestry and Environmental Science, and a MSC in Management of Forestry Systems, both held at the University of Florence, Italy. Currently he is a Senior Researcher at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), where he is involved in the activities of the Ecosystem Thematic Center (ETC), a facility of the Integrated Carbon Observatory System Research Infrastructure (ICOS-RI). At the ETC he deals with giving support to the ICOS stations concerning eddy covariance (EC), air meteorological measurements, and file submission. He is also in charge of running quality routines on EC data. Due to the expertise on in-situ measurements, he is often involved in project consortia, coordinating and leading tasks and work-packages related to in-situ observations.
In addition to the activities of ICOS, he is also following the activities of some PhD students at the DIBAF as their supervisor.

Stathes Hadjiefthymiades is a Professor on Large Scale Software Systems in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). His research interests are in the areas of distributed, mobile and pervasive systems. He leads the Research Lab on Network Technologies Services and Applications, the M.Sc. Programme on "Economics and Management of Telecommunication Networks and Information Systems". He is the project coordinator of the EO4EU and TRACE EU funded projects.

Thomas Maffei holds a master degree in environmental science from the University of Padua. He has focused his studies on the application of remote sensing data in the environmental field, and works as a remote sensing expert at AVT-ASI. He's responsible for the processing and analysis of hyperspectral images acquired in Europe with the fleet of AVT group.

My name is Tom Broeg and I’m currently working as a researcher in the “Thünen Earth Observation (ThEO)” group, located at the Thünen-Institue of Farm Economics. With our Project “KlimaFern” we are combining methods of remote sensing and digital soil mapping to improve the reportability of carbon emission in the agricultural sector. My work is focused on digital soil mapping and soil science, especially in the context of soil organic matter. In cooperation with the Thünen-Institue and the University of Thübingen, I’m currently working on my Ph.D. and the development of a remote sensing-based soil monitoring system.

Director @ OpenGeoHub Foundation
Visiting address: Agro Business Park 10, 6708PW Wageningen, NL
Tel: +31 (0)317 427537
Url: https://opengeohub.org/about
Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@opengeohub
Twitter: https://twitter.com/opengeohub
Medium: https://opengeohub.medium.com/
TIB: https://av.tib.eu/publisher/OpenGeoHub_Foundation
https://www.youtube.com/c/OpenGeoHubFoundation
Publications: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=2oYU7S8AAAAJ

Tushar is Managing Director of Margosa Environmental Solutions Ltd, a UK-based geoinformatics firm that delivers natural resource data products, analytics, and mapping solutions for various applications. He is also a Director at Spatial Ecology, an educational non-profit in the UK specialising in geocomputation. Tushar has an environmental engineering and management background with experience in water management, waste treatment, and energy and materials recovery from waste. He holds an MSc, DIC in Environmental Technology from Imperial College London.

I am a researcher at the Institute for Ecological Economics from the Vienna University of Economics and Business and at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. My field of research is Spatial Data Science with application in sustainability science, in particular land-use changes.

A postdoc researcher at Department Biogeochemical Integration, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry.