EarthCODE

EarthCODE Highlights from LPS 2025 ​

EarthCODE Highlights from LPS 2025 ​

Published: 16/07/2025

Living Planet Symposium 2025 (LPS25) was one of the premier Earth Observation events of the year, showcasing the latest scientific findings and applications that help address environmental and societal challenges. During the event, Open and FAIR Science was one of the leading topics of discussion among the community.

During the Agora Session Implementing FAIR Open Science: Advancing ESA’s EO Science Strategy, representatives from academia, policy, industry, and infrastructure initiatives discussed how open and FAIR practices can drive scientific excellence, collaboration, and innovation in Earth observation. The panel highlighted the importance of technological enablers like EarthCODE and APEx in supporting reproducibility of science, cross-agency cooperation, and long-term data accessibility - all key elements for Earth Action.

Their importance was further highlighted, during the Open Science Partnership Ceremony, where the ESA Director of Earth Observation, along with representatives from CNES (France), DLR (Germany), and the UK’s National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) reaffirmed their commitment to promoting open science principles and the importance of interoperability across ESA and national infrastructures.

The EarthCODE team was heavily involved in these events, and our primary goal was to advocate for the principles of FAIR and open data and science, while introducing tools that can support scientists and project leaders in realizing those goals. We did this by delivering a wide range of tutorials, workshops, training sessions, posters and facilitating discussions. Throughout the events, the team presented EarthCODE’s integrated platforms – offering powerful and flexible computing capabilities for advanced and FAIR compliant research, promoted the Open Science Catalogue, and offered practical guidance on FAIR dataset publication.

In addition, EarthCODE experts held 22 in-depth one-on-one sessions with scientists and project leaders to onboard their project outcomes and workflows into the Open Science Catalogue and host their datasets on the ESA Project Results Repository (PRR). These sessions were mutually beneficial: the EarthCODE team gathered insights into community needs, as well as valuable feedback to improve tools, documentation, and workflows that will shape EarthCODE’s future direction.

Overall, there was strong enthusiasm for EarthCODE’s discovery tool - the Open Science Catalogue - which provides information on projects, research outcomes and workflows from past and ongoing activities. Scientists and project members expressed interest in publishing their own work to the catalogue, the key benefit being greater visibility within the broader community and the increased ability to explore the outcomes and workflows of previous ESA projects. The ESA Project Results Repository (PRR) also received positive attention for meeting a widespread need among projects: long-term data storage. In fact, several projects indicated their intention to mirror datasets which are already hosted somewhere else due to the additional visibility and functionality offered by the PRR. Similarly, scientists and project teams were already using, or familiar with, the EarthCODE Integrated Platforms such as EDC, PolarTEP, openEO, and DeepESDL. Others expressed new interest in these platforms after learning about the potential for sponsorship through the Network of Resources, and their data visualisation and support tools.

Our experience at LPS25 reaffirmed that the Earth observation community is ready and willing to embrace Open Science. EarthCODE’s goal is to support this transition by providing the tools and know-how needed to make data and workflows more accessible, interoperable, and impactful. We look forward to continuing the work with the existing and new projects, and in the process building a thriving ecosystem of Open Earth Science.

If you have any questions or want to get involved with EarthCode, please don't hesitate to contact us at earth-code@esa.int!

Acknowledgements ​

We would like to thank the projects that took the time to engage in depth with us during the one-to-one sessions: