ESA's first BioSpace conference seems a huge success / Apr 2025

The European Space Agency organised the first conference on Biodiversity Insights from Space (BioSpace) in February this year, and it seems like it was a huge success. The conference itself sold out within days, and the program was so packed that the organisers had to split it into multiple chunks during the week to cope with everyone. I've only just gotten around to fully browsing the schedule, and it's incredible to see so much variety of work happening in biodiversity and remote sensing. Here's hoping that ESA makes this an annual event in Italy!

David A Coomes, who was on the scientific selection committee, told us about it so we hastily submitted a few abstracts which got selected for presentation! David himself talked about forest disturbance.

From Ground to Canopy: Integrating Ground-based Sensors with Remote Sensing to Improve Urban Tree Management

Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez presented the work we've been exploring at Cambridge and Imperial around using ultra low power sensors for biodiversity monitoring and urban health:

Urban trees are essential for supporting biodiversity, as they provide habitats for various species and help regulate water storage and temperature, and sequester CO₂ in urban ecosystems.Urban forests have been proposed as a nature-based solution to fight climate change and provide ecosystem services to citizens. Mapping and monitoring urban trees is vital as it facilitates conservation strategies for both flora and fauna, early diagnosis of plant pathogens, and zoning and urban development.

However, mapping trees has proved difficult for urban planners since they rely on in situ surveys or community-led projects that may not cover all areas; one such case is London, where the official survey only accounts for ~10% of the estimated 8 million trees in the city. Moreover, the geographic coordinates of trees are surprisingly unreliable due to a lack of precision of measuring devices (e.g. phones or commercial GPS).

We propose a method for calibrating urban tree locations using physical ground sensors as "anchors". These sensors help reconcile spatial mismatches across various spatial datasets, including high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery and tree surveys collected by city councils or in open-data projects like OSM. These low-power sensors can also collect microclimate and other biodiversity-related data, such as passive acoustic animal activity monitoring, providing a richer picture of tree and urban ecosystem health and enabling high resolution maps not previously possible. Our ultimate goal is to combine remote sensing information with ground-based measurements to support reliable data that can be used in geographic-based foundation models to help better urban planning strategies around trees that maximise their benefit to humans and nature.

You can read Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez's own writeup on his blog and watch the recording! Josh Millar would have made it to a poster presentation, but forgot to register in time and missed out due to how packed the conference was!

Establishing causal links which facilitate remote sensing of biodiversity metric

Onkar Gulati also prepared a poster for his PhD work on the topic of causality measurement. His notes from the conference about the use of SDGs are great:

My big takeaway from the opening speeches was that this is the first year that the ESA is spending more on building out its data science capabilities than it is on putting satellites into space. To me, this is indicative of the fact that the marginal benefit from putting effort into effectively wrangling huge amounts of data is now greater than that from collecting huge amounts of data at a faster pace.

Given the growing amount of space junk out there, getting more leverage over already gathered data seems very sensible indeed.

Another important point Onkar makes that I've been noticing in my own thoughts about national data libraries is:

A key point multiple speakers made note of (there were a dozen or so speakers talking for perhaps ~10 minutes each) was that introducing frameworks and methodologies to give countries national ownership of their data and the ability to independently generate compatible statistics was the priority, not introducing new data products. If we can move towards all countries using the same standards, we can enable the aggregation of statistics up in a reliable manner.

Since the February date of this BIOSPACE conference there has, of course, been a huge amount of geopolitical flux in the world. Countries gaining national ownership of their own data seems more important than ever. Onkar's full writeup is full of insights derived from the conference, so I encourage you to have a direct read!