Open Earth Monitor — Global Workshop 2024

Aleksandar Sekulić is a technical manager of GILAB DOO BEOGRAD and an assistant professor at the Department of Geodesy and Geoinformatics, Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Belgrade. His main areas of expertise are: GIS, Geostatistics, Machine Learning, and modelling of spatial and spatio-temporal phenomena, with an application in spatio-temporal interpolation of meteorological phenomena.

Postdoctoral researcher focusing on the applications of Earth Observation into environmental-economic accounting

Master of Nature and Environmental Protection working in the realm of Remote Sensing. Fascinated by the intersection of technology and nature, with a focus on machine learning, ecological modeling, and biodiversity monitoring. 🌍

Carmelo has a PhD in GIS Science and Remote Sensing from Wageningen University and Research (WUR) with a specialization in forest resources monitoring and management through geospatial data science applications and time series analysis.

I have been working in the Earth Observation in some capacity since 2009, where I had an internship at ESA in The Netherlands. Since then, I have been a Young Graduate Trainee at ESA in Rome, completed a PhD in Numerical and Marine Geophysics from Imperial College London, and have been working full time in the Earth Observation sector since 2017. Now a Senior Project Manager at Telespazio UK, I have worked on primarily ESA projects, including a Digital Twin Earth for Food Systems precursor, EO4SD Lab, CCI Sea State, several Thematic Exploitation Platforms, the TRUTHS Satellite. I am project manager for both the EOEPCA+ and EarthCODE ESA projects, both having FAIR Open Science principles at their forefront.

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.

Davide Consoli received the Ph.D. degree from Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy, in 2023, thesis on fast methods for computational electromagnetics with biomedical applications.

He is currently working as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the OpenGeoHub Foundation, The Netherlands. At OpenGeoHub, Davide supports the foundation’s work at international projects developing solutions for high performance computing and modeling on large scale spatiotemporal earth-observation data.

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.

Geospatial Data Scientist at the Crowther Lab, ETH Zurich.

I am a research scholar in the Biodiversity, Ecology, and Conservation (BEC) Research Group of the IIASA Biodiversity and Natural Resources (BNR) Program exploring the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning with a focus on plant functional traits, life-history theory, and spatial ecology.

Gebeyehu Abebe (Ph.D.), an assistant professor at Debre Berhan University in Ethiopia, specializes in remote sensing. His research interests span crop growth monitoring, SAR image processing, data fusion, machine learning algorithms, and crop modeling. Currently, he’s conducting research as part of the 2023 African Research Fellow program at ESA/ESRIN in Frascati, Italy.

Gilberto Câmara is a Brazilian researcher in Geoinformatics, GIScience, Spatial Analysis, and Land Use Modelling from INPE (Brazil's National Institute for Space Research). He was INPE’s director general (2005-2012), visiting professor at the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Münster (2013-2015), and Director of the Secretariat of GEO (Group on Earth Observations) from 2018-2021. He published 180 papers and cited more than 17,500 times with an H-index of 55 (Google Scholar, February 2024).

Gregory Duveiller holds a PhD in agronomical science and biological engineering from the Université catholique of Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium. After his PhD, he spent 10 years working at the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), in Ispra, Italy. He has specialized in developing methods to combine different satellite remote sensing data streams to better monitor and understand land processes, including crop yield monitoring, land cover change and land-atmosphere interactions. Since 2021 he is a project group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. His main research aims at improving our understanding of the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the Earth System by using data-driven yet process-based thinking applied to satellite Earth Observation data. A key focus is on exploring the complexity and diversity of terrestrial ecosystems, and how their specific functional properties affect land-atmosphere interactions.

I'm a Postdoctoral Researcher at the National Research Council of Italy (IRPI-CNR), working with Prof. Luca Brocca. I'm interested in developing machine learning tools to enhance hydrological monitoring and modeling. This work aims to improve our ability to mitigate natural hazards. My current research is focused on high-resolution satellite products with deep learning algorithm and create hybrid physics-aware models.

Research technician at CREAF.

CREAF is a research center based in Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. We are coordinators of the AD4GD EC (All Data for Grean Deal), were we are applying the knowledge gained in OGC, GEO, GIS and RS arena. The project is dealing with Data Spaces as an interoperable and standard solution for sharing and integrate multi source data.

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), H2020 Framework-biodiversity, H2020 WQeMS, HE OEMC, HE CitiObs, HE More4Nature, - ESA-IHE Phenotandem, EEA InCASE, 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.

• Research Associate (Open Earth Monitor Cyberinfrastructure, ongoing)
• PhD Geoinformatics (University of Münster, ongoing)
• M.Sc. Environmental Geography (University of Bayreuth, 2020)
• B.Sc. Geography (Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, 2017)

Dr Johannes Reiche is assistant professor at the Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen University where he leads the radar remote sensing group and the RADD forest disturbance alert development. He obtained his PhD (2015) from Wageningen University and his MSc (2011) from the University of Jena. His research interest is on utilizing radar remote sensing to unravel human activities in and dynamics of forest ecosystems, with a strong focus on multi-sensor methods, near real-time change monitoring and characterisation of drivers, follow-up land use and commodities.

Dr Katja Berger received the PhD in Agriculture and Remote Sensing at the University of Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, in remote sensing, agriculture and forestry. She worked as senior scientist at the Department of Geography (Physical Geography and Remote Sensing), at the Ludwigs-Maximilians Universität (LMU) München in the framework of the preparations of the German hyperspectral EnMAP mission. In this context she focused on efficient retrieval algorithms for multiple crop traits. In 2022 she joined the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL) at the University of Valencia, Spain, supporting research activities in the context of ESA CHIME projects. Since February 2024 she is employed as Post Doc at GFZ Potsdam. The work focus is on engaging with stakeholders and building networks to promote the uptake of EO data and products for forest and land monitoring applications, from national to global levels. She participated actively in COST actions, such as the “Pan-European Network of Green Deal Agriculture and Forestry Earth Observation Science” (PANGEOS) leading science communications with a focus on stakeholder engagement. She is organizing as main chair the EARSeL Imaging Spectroscopy workshop in April 2024 in Valencia and is an active member of the ESA’s Sentinel-2 next generation Mission Advisory Group (MAG).

Remote sensing researcher active in the agricultural domain, from crop classification to crop monitoring, in support of global food security.

Computer scientist with a PhD in Environmental Science working with remote sensing, data science, machine learning, high-performance computing and WebGIS applications.

Linda See is a Principal Research Scholar in the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability (NODES) research group at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). Her main research interests include artificial intelligence-based methods, geographic information systems (GIS), land cover, crowdsourcing, and citizen science. She is currently an editor of Environment and Planning B.

Luca Brocca received the Master's degree and the PhD in Civil Engineering in 2003 and 2008 respectively. Since (2009) 2019 he is (Researcher) Director of Research at the National Research Council, Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection of (CNR-IRPI) in Perugia. He is author and co-author of 190+ journal refereed papers (17000+ citations), 80+ papers in peer-reviewed conference proceedings/book chapters, and 10+ regional and global datasets.
Luca Brocca is involved as PI (and co-PI) in several projects funded by the European Commission and Space Agencies (ESA, EUMETSAT).
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 (soil moisture, rainfall, river discharge) for hydrological applications including floods, landslides, rainfall, droughts, irrigation, water resources management (e.g., SM2RAIN, irrigation from space).

María Fernanda is a serial entrepreneur and innovator. She has been creating technological Startups, and business solutions since 2010. She has a Ph.D in Quantum Physics (University of Barcelona, Spain), a Master in Numerical Methods (Polytechnic University of Cataluña, Spain), and MBA from IESE Business School. She has undergraduate studies in Theoretical Physics, Civil Engineering and Physical Oceanography in Colombia. María Fernanda is a specialist in creating business solutions based on Big Data and Machine Learning for large corporations, improving their annual turnover between 5 and 7 percent. In 2013 she was invited by the United States and nominated by Spain to represent the country in its prestigious IVLP (International Visitor Leadership Program). During her professional career she has received the support of several governments through different grants such as the Catalan Government, the Spanish Government, the American Government, the South Korean Government and the Dutch Government.

Her latest venture, of which she is the CEO, is called Planetai Space, which provides services to quantify the Natural Capital of our planet and the negative effects of air pollution on the environment.

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Martijn is a junior researcher at OpenGeoHub. He likes to play with probabilities to make maps more useful.

Martin Jung is a Senior Research Scholar with the Biodiversity, Ecology, and Conservation (BEC) Research Group. His current research focusses broadly on nexus topics of land-use, socio-economic management practices and biodiversity indicators as well as investigating cost-effective solutions for robust monitoring and planning of conservation interventions for species and ecosystems.

Mikaël Maes is a climate and environmental data scientist with over 9 years of professional experience in international organizations, academia, and the private sector. He currently works at the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) in Paris (France), working with OECD countries and analyzing large geospatial data sources to support them with environmental and climate change challenges. Previously, Mikaël obtained a doctorate degree in Environmental Science at University College London, where he was part of a large epidemiological study researching the associations between nature exposure and children's mental health and cognitive development. Mikaël also holds an MSc degree in Environmental Science from King's College London, as well as MSc and BSc degrees in Biology from Ghent University.

Milutin Milenković is a research scholar in the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group of the IIASA Advancing Systems Analysis Program. His current research combines Earth observation and citizen science to monitor environmental change, particularly tropical forest growth and resilience. He is also a guest researcher in the Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing lab at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and a guest lecturer at Vienna University of Technology, Austria.

I'm a veterinarian with a background in animal science and currently a PhD student in Environmental Sciences. I work as a researcher and field lead at the Image Processing and GIS laboratory at the Federal University of Goiás. I'm also involved in the Global Pasture Watch Initiative as a member of Lapig's team.

Pontus Lurcock is a software engineer at Brockmann Consult GmbH, with a strong focus on geodatacubes and analysis-ready earth observation data. He has extensive experience of working at the interface between informatics and geosciences, and holds an MSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Geology.

Dr. Robert Masolele is a post-doctoral researcher renowned for his work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and remote sensing, particularly in the field of classifying land use changes with a specific emphasis on commodity crops. His innovative research has contributed significantly to our understanding of how agricultural expansion, particularly in the cultivation of commodity crops, impacts global landscapes.

Education and Early Career:
Dr. Masolele earned his Ph.D. in Remote sensing and Machine learning from Wageningen University, where his passion for harnessing cutting-edge technologies to address pressing environmental challenges first took root. His early career saw him working on various projects related to satellite imagery analysis and machine learning applications, laying the foundation for his expertise in the intricate field of land use classification.

Expertise in AI and Satellite Imagery:
Specializing in the fusion of artificial intelligence and high-resolution satellite imagery, Dr. Masolele has developed advanced models and algorithms that excel in classifying land use changes with high accuracy. His research focuses on monitoring the expansion of commodity crops such as cacao, oil palm, rubber, coffee, avocado, pasture, and soy, providing valuable insights into the environmental repercussions of large-scale agricultural practices.

Notable Contributions:
One of Dr. Masolele's most notable contributions includes the development of a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture tailored to handle the complexities of commodity crop identification. His work has led to breakthroughs in mapping the spatial distribution of land use following deforestation, understanding the dynamics of deforestation, and quantifying the ecological impact of crop expansion.

Collaborations and Impact:
Dr. Masolele is a sought-after collaborator in interdisciplinary research endeavors, fostering partnerships between environmental scientists, ecologists, and computer scientists. His work has had a tangible impact on sustainable land management practices and has been influential in shaping conservation policies in regions vulnerable to agricultural encroachment.

Publications:
In recognition of his outstanding contributions, Dr. Robert Masolele's work has been published in leading academic journals, media outlets, and he frequently presents his findings at international conferences.

As Dr. Masolele continues to push the boundaries of knowledge in his field, his dedication to leveraging artificial intelligence and satellite imagery for the betterment of global ecosystems remains a beacon of inspiration for the scientific community.

Rolf obtained his doctoral degree in Environmental Sciences in 2021 and has a background in geoinformatics, complex systems modeling, and business administration. At OpenGeoHub, he is a postdoctoral researcher.

Dr. Santiago Vargas Domínguez earned his bachelor's degree in Physics and went on to receive both an M.Sc and Ph.D. in Astrophysics. With over 20 years of research experience acquired at institutions across America and Europe, Dr. Vargas specializes in image processing and algorithm application ranging from astrophysics to Earth observation. His expertise extends to utilizing artificial intelligence for data extraction, enabling the development of strategic solutions across various domains.

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 Junior Researcher at the Euri-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 during the labelling time, and of caring the correct metadata ingestion of sensors by the processing routines.

I am Landscape ecologists working at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv)
Halle-Jena-Leipzig and at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), contributing to the Global Pasture Watch (GPW) project and designing the LUCKINet computational workflow.

Stien Heremans obtained her master in Earth Observation from Leuven University in 2009. She then proceeded with a PhD about the use of machine learning methods for sub-pixel crop classification, which she successfully defended in 2015. Since then, she has been working as a remote sensing expert in the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) of the Flemish government and as a post-doctoral researcher at Leuven University. Her research focuses on the integration of remote sensing data into policy-relevant environmental monitoring and modeling.

Tom is the Director at the OpenGeoHub foundation. He has more than 20 years of experience as an environmental modeler, data scientist and spatial analyst with background in soil mapping and geo-information science. He continuously runs hands-on-R training courses to promote use of Open Source software for spatial analysis / spatial modeling purposes. He is currently the project leader of the OpenLandMap — a system for automated global soil and vegetation mapping at fine spatial resolutions (100 m, 250 m to 1 km) and which aspires to be recognized as an “OpenStreetMap-type” system for environmental data. Tom’s core core philosophy is outlined in this document (see also our Medium article on OpenLandMap.org). Tom is recipient of the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers for 2021/2022/2023.

Valentina Premier received her Ph.D. degree in information engineering and computer science at the University of Trento, Trento, Italy within the Remote Sensing Laboratory and with Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy, within the Institute for Earth Observation. She is working on snow water equivalent retrieval by using remote sensing data.

Yu-Feng works in OpenGeoHub, specializing in geocomputing with geo spatial data, optimize and automate modeling frameworks, and parallelization, and back-end development.

Ziga Malek is a landscape scientist interested in combining statistical and in-situ data on land use with earth observation products to map the way we use our terrestrial surface beyond what we can observe with satellites. This way, he has mapped the spatial distribution of organic farmers worldwide, land-use decision making and grazing in seminatural areas in Europe. In addition, he has developed land use models - many of which used data derived from earth observation - all across the globe and on different scales. Ziga has obtained his engineers degree at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and his PhD at the University of Vienna, Austria.