Sentinel-2 image of Vienna, acquired on the 15th June 2025. Credit: Copernicus Sentinel data 2025
Unlike Ultravox who walked in the cold air in Vienna, it looks like I will be warm as I head to the city for next week’s European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium.
The Living Planet’s Symposia is a triennial event, meaning it is held every three years, and is one of the leading global events on Earth Observation (EO).
Living Planet 2025
Living Planet 2025 (LPS25) takes place between the 23rd and 27th of June at the Austria Center Vienna, located on Donauinsel, also known as Danube Island, which is the large island just above the Danube River which cuts through the centre of the image. This year the event will be focusing on transitioning from observation to climate action and sustainability for Earth. The symposium offers an opportunity for academics, students, space industry professionals, government representatives, and commercial organisation employees to come together to discuss the latest scientific insights, innovations and applications using satellite data and how these can be developed to help address environmental and societal challenges.
There are six different high-level steams running for LPS25, and each has variety of talks, demonstrations, tutorials, and poster sessions. The steams are:
- Earth Science Frontiers – how new and existing mission data strengthens our understanding and modelling capabilities of the various interconnected systems of our planet.
- Climate Action and Sustainability Challenges – demonstrating how EO supports monitoring, mitigation and adaptation efforts to tackle environmental and societal challenges.
- EO Missions – showcasing findings from ESA’s Earth Observation Science, Copernicus and Meteorological missions alongside with results from national programmes.
- Digital Innovation and Green Solutions – how integrating of digital technologies can enable green solutions.
- Partnerships with Industry for New Applications – focuses on building on existing partnerships and nurturing new alliances to boost commercialisation and encouraging more dialogue within the New Space ecosystem.
- Global Cooperation and Policy Support – highlighting the impact and the adoption of space infrastructures and data can enable policies and cooperation across diverse sectors
Personally, I involved in several events:
- TRUTHS poster “TRUTHS impact studies: Ocean Biology and Tipping Points through Ocean Colour (OCTips)” presentation on Monday at the TRUTHS Agora.
- Space for Climate Observatory short pitch presentation on Tuesday morning, and a longer oral presentation of our “SwedCoast-BlueCarb project: mapping eelgrass extent and health” on Wednesday afternoon.
- Panelist at an Early Career Scientist event on Thursday morning.
- Chairing a session on New Space Missions Data Quality & Cal/Val Friday morning and poster “Consistency of hyperspectral time-series datasets, showcased through New Space and Third Party Missions.
Although, the event starts on the Monday, there are tutorials beginning on the Sunday afternoon, to provide hands-on experience and practical learning on various topic, and I will be supporting the Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS) tutorial on Sunday.
Summary
I am excited about next week and looking forward to visiting Vienna and a busy week at the Symposium. Although, as the 2022 event had almost 5 000 attendees, it might be more luck than judgement who I meet and talk with during the week. If you do see me about, please come up and say hello!
I’ll provide an update of the event in next week’s blog.
