Julia Wagemann (PhD)
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.
Sessions
The era of open Earth Observation (EO) data started 2008 when the United States Geological Survey (USGS) made the Landsat archive available free-of-charge. Since then, the amount of open EO data has increased exponentially, also due to Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth Observation programme. The current wealth of open EO data available is unprecedented. This leads to the current situation that a considerable fraction of the open EO data produced and disseminated on a daily basis is not used as users cannot access, process and analyse the data. Questions on how EO data can be utilised to better support the Green New Deal and related communities, such as Renewable Energies, lead the discussion now and will do so in the coming years. A better understanding of the needs and requirements of different users (from EO data users to policy- and decision-makers) will be vital in shaping the future of open EO data.
“To create the future, we must understand the past” is a famous quote stated by astrophysicist Dr. Carl Sagan. Hence, in this keynote talk, I would like to take the audience on a time travel through the era of open EO data. We will take the perspective of an EO data user and first identify key milestones and developments since 2008 before we draw a more detailed picture of what it is like at the moment to discover, access, process and retrieve knowledge from open EO data. After we shed a light on the past and the present, time travel continues to the year 2030 and together with the audience, I’d like to develop a wish list on how open EO data shall be of value for different stakeholders in the future and extract the key requirements that are needed to achieve this.