Keynote Lectures

Scaling Biophysical Reality: The Evolution of Operational National to Continental Monitoring
Peter Scarth, University of Queensland, Australia, Australia

From the Swiss Data Cube to Living Switzerland: Developing a Digital Twin of the Environment
Gregory Giuliani, University of Geneva, Switzerland, Switzerland

What Can Remote Sensing Tell Us About Wildfires?
María Lucrecia Pettinari, University of Alcala, Spain, Spain

Abstract
Effective global land management faces a critical tension: the necessity for consistent, long-term Earth observation monitoring extending back to the 1980s versus the rapid evolution and expansion of platforms, sensors and algorithmic paradigms. This keynote addresses the challenge of harmonising historical archives with modern high-dimensional data and analytics, using the Australian continent as a primary case study for operational biophysical monitoring of the land surface. With a focus on Australia, the keynote will outline the decadal evolution of a novel Fractional Cover methodology that has moved beyond static indices to a system that measures biophysical reality in landscapes defined by extreme climatic variability. The presentation details a progressive technical transition from traditional linear spectral unmixing to a modern Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) machine learning framework. Crucially, this Machine Learning (ML) approach maintains strict biophysical constraints—ensuring cover fractions (e.g., vegetation, soil, water) sum to 100% and remain non-negative—while offering superior computational efficiency compared to iterative spectral unmixing methods. This evolution enables seamless integration of diverse data sources (from Landsat to Sentinel-2) to achieve the consistency required for long-term trend analysis. Major focus will be placed on the validation challenges inherent to the mapping and monitoring of large land areas, including transitioning from subjective field-based estimates of biophysical attributes to more objective sensor-based methods and the automated generation of training data for ML algorithms from very high resolution (VHR) imagery acquired by sensors on platforms ranging from drones to satellites. Finally, and building on the case study, we demonstrate how the methods developed have transcended national borders. By underpinning the Digital Earth Australia and Digital Earth Africa platforms, this approach now supports diverse applications ranging from sediment management in the Great Barrier Reef (Reef 2050) to food security monitoring across Africa. The session will conclude with a discussion on the future of globalised algorithms and the harmonisation efforts required to apply these models across disparate ecological and spectral domains.

Abstract
Switzerland is advancing from the long-established Swiss Data Cube (SDC)—a national data infrastructure providing analysis-ready satellite Earth observation data—towards Living Switzerland, a next-generation digital twin of the environment. This transition represents a paradigm shift from static data access and analysis to dynamic, integrated environmental intelligence. Building on the SDC’s robust foundation of standardized, analysis-ready data and open science principles, Living Switzerland leverages the Living Earth framework to enable real-time integration of multi-source environmental data, modeling, and simulation. The system aims to create a continuously updated, semantically rich, and interoperable representation of Switzerland’s natural environment—encompassing land, water, atmosphere, and biodiversity. Through this transformation, Living Switzerland will support evidence-based decision-making, enhance environmental monitoring and forecasting, and foster collaborative research across domains.

Abstract
Wildfires have been a natural part of the Earth System for millennia, shaping the distribution and characteristics of the vegetation and the carbon storage in vegetation and soils. But since humans started using fire, natural wildfire regimes were altered, and nowadays most fire events worldwide have an anthropogenic origin or are altered by human intervention, through changes in fuel availability to be consumed by the fire, via fire suppression activities, or even due to climate change. Understanding fire dynamics is essential to support decision-making for fire management and policy by providing accurate and timely information that can help prevention, suppression and mitigation efforts, and to better understand the relationship between climate change and fire regimes, contributing to global efforts in environmental protection and sustainable land management. This keynote will focus on how remote sensing helps study wildfire risk and occurrence worldwide by providing consistent, large-scale, and near-real-time observations of the Earth’s surface. Satellites equipped with thermal and optical sensors can detect active fires, monitor burned areas, and track changes in vegetation and land conditions that influence fire susceptibility. This global coverage is especially valuable in remote or inaccessible regions where ground-based monitoring is limited or impossible. Complementary, remote sensing also facilitates the assessment of key environmental factors such as fuel distribution and characteristics or vegetation moisture content, amongst others, which contribute to fire danger, as well as the study of fire effects, such as fire severity and carbon emissions. A particular emphasis will be given to fire detection and mapping, as has been implemented in the ESA FireCCI project.