Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview | |
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Location: James Cook Bld. 1, main entrance |
| 10:00am - 11:30am |
Thematic sessions - Sustainability indicators Location: James Cook Chairs: Grazia Zulian and Eleonora De FalcisClimate Extremes and Food Security in Malawi 1: Statistics Norway, Norway; 2: Norwegian Space Agency, Norway 10:10am - 10:20am Earth Observations and Machine Learning for Gridded Macroeconomic Data International Monetary Fund 10:20am - 10:30am Analysis of Earth Observation Data for Economic Statistics German Federal Statistical Office, Germany 10:30am - 10:40am Earth Observation and AI for Construction Statistics (EO4ConStat): Developing an EO-based Approach for Quality Assessment in Building Statistics 1: Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy Germany; 2: Federal Statistical Office Germany; 3: German Aerospace Center 10:40am - 10:50am Has pasture already peaked in 2000? The first independent global statistical assessment of grassland, livestock association, and change 1: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA); 2: OpenGeoHub Foundation; 3: World Resources Institute; 4: Remote Sensing and GIS Laboratory (LAPIG/UFG) 10:50am - 11:00am From long-term (>30 years) annual ESA CCI / EU C3S global 300 m categorical land use and land cover change maps to an equivalent long-term global annual series of spatially explicit sub-pixel plant functional type fractions informed by 10–30 m EO datasets 1: UCLouvain-Geomatics (Belgium), Belgium; 2: Met Office, UK; 3: LSCE, France; 4: Brockmann Consult Gmbh, Germany; 5: European Space Agency ECSAT, UK 11:00am - 11:10am Mapping the Unmapped: Integrating Earth Observation and Open Data to Construct Brazil’s National Rural Road Network Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, Brazil |
| 11:45am - 1:30pm |
Thematic sessions - Forest statistics Location: James Cook Chairs: Neha Hunka and Rene ColditzIntegrating EO and ground biomass information through robust statistical techniques: GFOI recommendations for climate policy reporting 1: GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, Germany; 2: Departament of Forest Resources, University of Minnesota; 3: European Space Agency; 4: Servicio Forestal y de Fauna Silvestre (SERFOR), Peru 11:55am - 12:05pm The National Satellite Information System for Environmental Indicators and Policy Support Polish Space Agency, Poland 12:05pm - 12:15pm Seeing forests clearly: Insights from a Systematic Review of FI-EO Integration 1: GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences; 2: University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) 12:15pm - 12:25pm Harmonized approach for multi-purpose activity data to support AFOLU policies 1: GAF AG, Germany; 2: IGN FI, France; 3: The World Bank Group, USA 12:25pm - 12:35pm Deriving policy-relevant Essential Biodiversity Variables from EO multi-modal approach to assess forest condition across ecological gradients 1: University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Italy; 2: University of Zurich, Department of Geography, Switzerland; 3: SARMAP sa, Caslano, Switzerland; 4: Climate Action, Sustainability and Science Department, European Space Agency, Frascati, Italy; 5: SERCO for ESA - Climate Action, Sustainability and Science Department, European Space Agency, Frascati, Italy 12:35pm - 12:45pm Innovative Restructuring of the FAO FRA 2025 Remote Sensing Survey 1: FAO, Italy; 2: ESF, USA 12:45pm - 12:55pm From Land Cover to Land Use: A Remote Sensing–Based Map of Forest Area in Europe DG JRC European Commission, Italy 12:55pm - 1:05pm Combining NFI and EO data – alley to success for a reliable European Forest Monitoring System? NIBIO, Norway 1:05pm - 1:15pm Unit-level National-scale small-area estimation in Italy geoLAB, - Laboratory of Forest Geomatics, Dept. of Agriculture, Food, Environment and Forestry, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Via San Bonaventura 13, 50145 Firenze, Italy |
| 10:00am - 11:30am |
Workshops - Earth Observations for Agrifood systems applications Location: James Cook Reliable statistics are foundational for evidence-based policy and for tracking progress toward national and global agri-food systems. Agricultural statistics inform decisions on productivity, resilience, and sustainability. But conventional sources, such as farm surveys, censuses, and administrative records are costly, infrequent, and uneven in coverage, creating gaps in timeliness, spatial detail, and comparability. These gaps are especially acute for emerging priorities such as land-use change, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture and land use, and the intensity and risks associated with fertilizer and pesticide applications.
Earth observations (EO) provide consistent, frequent, and scalable measures to help close these gaps. Optical and radar satellites reveal crop types, phenology, management intensity, and land conversion, and ancillary datasets support inference on emissions drivers and environmental risks. Integrating EO with in situ monitoring and standardized methodologies enables more consistent, granular, and timely indicators that support agri-food systems, climate and biodiversity commitments, and SDG reporting.
Major scope of the workshop is to help participants operate EO for official-quality statistics. We will feature 5 to 7 invited talks on the topics above and facilitate brainstorming to develop concrete proposals on: (1) EO requirements for agri-food statistics; (2) harmonized definitions for agri-food system statistics across land cover/use categories; (3) QA/QC and intercomparison of remote-sensing data products; and (4) data infrastructure for delivering remote-sensing products.
Earth Observations for Agrifood systems applications 1: Digital FAO and Agro-Informatics Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; 2: Statistics Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations |
| 11:45am - 1:30pm |
Workshop - GFOI R&D Session on integrating EO- and ground-data for enhanced forest-related biomass estimation Location: James Cook This workshop will delve into current needs and opportunities for integrating forest biomass information from forest inventories, national statistics and Earth Observation to strengthen the monitoring and reporting of forest biomass for environmental assessments and climate action. We will begin by reviewing the latest recommendations on using EO-based biomass products within MRV processes and international frameworks, as well as briefly touch upon ESA’s Biomass mission advances. Building upon recent discussions led by the Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI), we will discuss three different pathways leading towards the integration of these datasets, namely (1) key considerations informing the design of new ground-based campaigns to ensure both compatibility with and added value from EO datasets; (2) lessons learned from experiences combining and harmonizing different existing in-situ data (e.g., National Forest Inventories, among others) for their integration with EO datasets; and (3) assessment of inferential strategies for the integration of EO-based biomass datasets with in-situ data to enhance the precision of biomass estimates at different geographical scales. These pathways aim to support a broad range of end users in biomass estimation for forest monitoring and management purposes.
The workshop will open with short presentations highlighting success stories and state-of-the-art examples on these themes, followed by a short round of questions. Afterwards, three parallel round-table discussion groups, focusing respectively on the three pathways for conceiving the integration of in-situ data, EO-based biomass datasets and national statistics.
The session will conclude with summary presentations from the three discussion groups, followed by closing remarks and next steps. We aim to map existing efforts, key considerations, best practices and research needs under these themes, bridging efforts in tropical and temperate regions, and ultimately summarizing these findings in a perspective paper or policy brief.
The policy brief or perspective paper will summarize the efforts, considerations, and best practices for integrating ground-based and EO data for forest-related biomass estimation, with examples ranging from tropical to temperate (European) forests. This an outcome envisioned from both this workshop and the insights from the upcoming GFOI R&D Exchange on Biomass Estimation.
GFOI R&D Session on integrating EO- and ground-data for enhanced forest-related biomass estimation 1: GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences; 2: European Space Agency; 3: Food and Agriculture Organization |
