It’s the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium 2022 all this week! The conference is being held at the World Conference Centre in Bonn, Germany, which means I’ve had to navigate airports, flights and passport control for the first time in over two years!
This is ESA’s premier conference for Earth Observation (EO) and the Symposium is the regular venue for everyone in Europe and further afield to catch up. It focuses on presenting the latest scientific research on EO, together with how EO applications are supporting the building of a sustainable future and a resilient society. The conference is always large with several thousand attendees, and this year will be no difference with four and half thousand people registered for Bonn this week. It has felt strange to be with a large group of colleagues after months spent avoiding meetings and events!
The objectives for Living Planet are:
- Show how satellite data and open science contribute to our understanding of the different Earth systems, climate and their interactions.
- Demonstrate new EO instruments and technologies for existing and future missions.
- Highlight the importance of existing and new partnerships, expand the EO user base, increase access to capital and commercialisation.
- Demonstrate how next generation technologies will create new opportunities for EO
- Confirm how EO services can be integrated with local, national and global policies to drive socio-economic sustainable development, security, and resilience.
Living Planet 2022 Symposium
The conference began on Monday and I arrived early enough to get a seat in the main auditorium for the opening plenary sessions. I was interested to learn that the venue, the World Conference Centre, served as the German Bundestag, the Provisional Parliament House for West Germany before unification. The main auditorium was the former Parliamentary Chamber. As can be seen from the photo, it has a circular seating format and a large metal sculpture of the Bundestag eagle that has asymmetrical and patchy plumage to show MPs that they will never achieve perfection.
The conference opened with a presentation from Josef Aschbacher, the Director General of ESA, titled ‘The Next Frontiers in Earth Observation’. He emphasised the urgency to act on climate, commercialisation and security; but that it was essential to focus on these as opportunities rather than with a crisis mentality. There is over 25 TB of EO data generated every day, and co-operation and commercialisation will be needed to best utilise this resource.
The second speaker was Alexander Gerst, an ESA Astronaut. On seeing Europe at night, he was struck by the realisation of how much humans have changed the Earth, something astronauts often highlight on their return from space.
Alexander was followed by speakers from ESA, European institutions and Sinergise, an example of a successful company. EO is seen as providing an indispensable contribution to society. For instance, during COVID, there were reduced commercial aircraft flights and these flights are a significant source of data for weather forecasting. Luckily, increased usage of EO satellite sources meant that lost data did not degrade forecasting accuracy. However, it was emphasised there is still a need to stimulate the space ecosystem through the growth of space companies and the development of digital infrastructure. The successful uptake of EO-derived information requires collaboration from the start, so all sides can agree on what is needed.
I spent the rest of Monday in the Ocean Health sessions. Several presentations highlighted that the more sources and higher resolution data we access, the more information we can extract and use to understand processes. One of the presenters was Sophie Durston, a PhD student within the NERC funded SENSE Centre for Doctoral Training, whom Pixalytics is a CASE sponsor for. She’s using modelling and EO to understand Sargassum (a floating seaweed), it was great to, finally, meet Sophie in person.
Tuesday’s focus was Quality Assurance, an activity I support through Telespazio UK. The first session focused on the Data Quality of Very High Resolution (VHR) optical and SAR missions. Several presentations showed the approach and results from the ESA funded Earthnet Data Assessment Pilot (EDAP). EDAP has been responsible for assessing the quality and suitability of candidate missions being considered for the Earthnet Third Party Missions (TPM) i.e., not operated by ESA but with their data access funded so that scientists can use this broader set of missions. During the poster session, I co-presented a poster on the Japanese MOS missions that operated in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the data received by ESA are being processed as a heritage dataset by ESA.
There are so many sessions going on at the same time, it is difficult to decide what to see! Today I beginning with sessions on using EO to detect marine litter and debris as this is something that Pixalytics is also working on. I’m presenting my second poster of the week later today, on the ‘Detection of Marine Plastic Source Locations using Machine Learning applied to Sentinel-1 & Sentinel-2 Data’ this an European Space Agency funded project led by CLS, a French company, who we have been collaborating with. Come up and say hello if you’re around later!
It’s being great to catch up with old friends in person, and even better to meet some people for first time who I’ve only known from a computer screen! Really looking forward to the rest of the week!
