Beneath the tundra and forests of the Arctic lies permafrost: ground frozen year-round. @smstuenzi.bsky.social's research focuses on how boreal forests and permafrost interact, and what happens when that relationship breaks down. Read all about it in this new StoryMap! arcg.is/18Wa810

Blurry Vision - Do context-aware Earth embeddings such as Alpha Earth Foundations suppress spatial variability? Check out our experiment in the blog post: philipperufin.github.io/blog/blurryv...

@timnitgebru.blacksky.app was really generous with her time when i asked her for this interview for @sciam.bsky.social #sciamyoungscientists. she has a lot of prescient things to say here. take a look. www.scientificamerican.com/article/timn...

Timnit Gebru on how to safeguard independent science for the AI age

On safeguarding independent research in the age of big tech

scientificamerican.com

GLP Week of Land System Science is coming up with plenty of cool content, including the remote sensing working group´s webinar on "Pixel Politics: Advancing Critical Remote Sensing": Join @glp-earth.bsky.social & sign up: members.glp.earth/networks/eve...

Pixel Politics: Advancing Critical Remote Sensing

<!--br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}--> The GLP Working Group on Remote Sensing for Land System Science is proud to have Mia Bennett as a guest speaker for this webinar on "Pixel Politics". Mia´s wo...

members.glp.earth

Grassland age is a critical parameter influencing carbon sequestration potential, biodiversity support, and ecosystem resilience. 
A new study published in Remote Sensing of Environment presents a national-scale framework to estimate grassland age across Germany using satellite time series:

Angola’s northern escarpment forest is disappearing before our eyes --> doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🛰️⌨️🌽Field delineation code repository v1 online: github.com/philipperufi... Test smallholder field delineation workflow in Mozambique with sample data and pre-trained models: produce pseudo-labels, run fine-tuning, inference and post-processing.

GitHub - philipperufin/smallholder-fields

Contribute to philipperufin/smallholder-fields development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Smallholder farming systems are notoriously difficult to map from space. Landscapes are fragmented and global maps often disagree, yet data on where farming actually happens is fundamental to designing effective land use and sustainability policies.
 A few things stood out in the data! 📊 ⬇️

New publication out now! @philrufin.bsky.social, Pauline Hammer et al. mapped 17M fields in Mozambique using deep learning and satellite imagery. With 78% of fields being <0.5 ha, this provides critical data for sustainable land use policies! Read more here: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

www.microsoft.com/en-us/micros... is it good to build an entire economy and software infrastructure on this

ICYMI, I got to talk to dynamic duo @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social for the 404 Media podcast. we get into what keeps us hopeful, why Emily is done with the word "democratizing" in AI, and ridicule as praxis. listen wherever you get your pods! www.404media.co/ridicule-as-...

Worthwile feature on Dr. Ibrahim´s PhD research @humboldteolab.bsky.social on farming systems in Nigeria!

Earth Observation Lab@humboldteolab.bsky.social · 5mo ago

In her PhD research at the Earth Observation Lab, Dr. Esther Shupel Ibrahim analyzed impacts of climate change and diseases on smallholder agriculture in Nigeria. Explore her research in this StoryMap and watch the interview with @hostertp.bsky.social about findings and challenges ⬇️ arcg.is/1bG48K

We love reading good news! In the past three years alone, the TPM programme has contributed to 882 research projects, helping teams from 66 countries, including Greece, Italy, the UK, and many more. Here are some examples: earth.esa.int/eogateway/in...

Posting for reach because I dont know how the Blue Sky Algorithm works: The Moral Case for a Humanitarian Satellite: www.linkedin.com/pulse/moral-... It's about time that the space race included missions that actually help the people. #Remotesensing #CivilSociety #humanitarian #GIS

A Moral Case for a Humanitarian Satellite: At what point does inaction become unconscionable?

What does it say about our world when we spend over $54 billion a year on defense and intelligence satellites to spy on each other - yet cannot dedicate even one satellite to saving lives? We take pic...

linkedin.com

In this work led by Josh Wilson, we labelled 4824 drone-based images containing 49990 birds from 101 species and trained a bird detection and ID model. The model achieved precision = 0.91 for detection & 0.65 for species/age/sex classification. zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Big Bird: A global dataset of birds in drone imagery annotated to species level

Drones are a valuable tool for surveying birds, but manually detecting and identifying birds in drone images is costly. We assembled a diverse dataset of 23 865 images of birds captured with 21 diffe...

zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

How can a “Digital Twin” help to build a more resilient agricultural future? The #EOAgriTwin project creates virtual replicas of agricultural systems to monitor crop conditions under various stressors. Explore the tools, use cases and methods in this video!

EOAgriTwin: Earth Observation-based Digital Twin for Resilient Agriculture under Multiple Stressors

YouTube video by Leibniz-Zentrum für Agrarlandschaftsforschung (ZALF) e.V.

youtube.com

Earth Observation Lab@humboldteolab.bsky.social · 6mo ago

EOLab’s Florian Poetzschner is presenting current progress of Field delineation and water use assessment for EOAgriTwin - ‘A Digital Twin for Agriculture under multiple stressors’ at ESA's Open Science Meeting in Frascati Find out more about the project: www.eoagritwin.eu

Commodity frontiers expand more slowly into tropical forests where forest smallholders are present – new paper out in PNAS led by Marie Pratzer www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @tkuemmerle.bsky.social @humboldtuni.bsky.social @pnas.org

Valerie Thomas spent 30+ years at NASA helping revolutionize how we see images from space & our own world. #WomenInSTEM Managed the development of the first image-processing systems for the Landsat program allowing satellites to send the 1st multi-spectral pictures of Earth back to scientists.(1/2)

EOLab’s Florian Poetzschner is presenting current progress of Field delineation and water use assessment for EOAgriTwin - ‘A Digital Twin for Agriculture under multiple stressors’ at ESA's Open Science Meeting in Frascati Find out more about the project: www.eoagritwin.eu

In two weeks, world leaders and tech executives will descend on Delhi for the AI Impact Summit 2026. There, power brokers will paint a pretty picture of the role AI will play in saving the world - from sharing prosperity to fixing climate change.

🌍 Geospatial data science in 2025 still comes down to two words: foundation models. And over the past months, we’ve had the chance to put that idea into practice for global flood mapping. Summary figures & discussion on Hugging Face: 👉 lnkd.in/euR9DXfX Full technical preprint: 👉 lnkd.in/eYMCZd9e

Join us for the upcoming #EOAgriTwin webinar focusing on the latest progress of our #DigitalTwin Component for agriculture. We will share the current status and demonstrate key capabilities. 📅 13 January 2026, 13:00 Registration: www.eoagritwin.eu/webinar @zalf.bsky.social

Thanks to an amazing network of colleagues and friends, 50% of the funding have been secured already! 🌍🌽💧

Philippe Rufin@philrufin.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Following a field campaign in Gilé National Park, Mozambique, I´ve launched a crowdfunding campaign to support nature conservation by helping farmers improve their production with irrigation: www.gofundme.com/f/fight-pove... Please help make this work and donate or share with friends & family! ❤️

Following a field campaign in Gilé National Park, Mozambique, I´ve launched a crowdfunding campaign to support nature conservation by helping farmers improve their production with irrigation: www.gofundme.com/f/fight-pove... Please help make this work and donate or share with friends & family! ❤️

Donate to Protecting nature by fighting poverty in Mozambique, organized by Philippe Rufin

I am Philippe Rufin, a scientist working in the nexus of small-scal… Philippe Rufin needs your support for Protecting nature by fighting poverty in Mozambique

gofundme.com

I was on a podcast talking about Common Space: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQof... I can't stand listening to myself speak, so let me know if i was any good.

Earth Observed | Episode 1: Bill Greer | How Nonprofit Satellites Could Change Everything

YouTube video by The Leadership Lab

youtube.com

Great to see this out - Shupel is a true role model, paving the way for female researchers from northern Nigeria!

Earth Observation Lab@humboldteolab.bsky.social · last yr.

Using Remote Sensing and Agro-Ecosystem Modelling 🛰️🌽📈, Esther Shupel Ibrahim analyzes impacts of climate change and diseases on smallholder agriculture in Nigeria and develops strategies to support and empower smallholder farmers. Find out more about her PhD research in this StoryMap: arcg.is/1bG48K

Using Remote Sensing and Agro-Ecosystem Modelling 🛰️🌽📈, Esther Shupel Ibrahim analyzes impacts of climate change and diseases on smallholder agriculture in Nigeria and develops strategies to support and empower smallholder farmers. Find out more about her PhD research in this StoryMap: arcg.is/1bG48K

On July 3rd, astronaut Nichole Ayers photographed a rare Gigantic jet from the ISS. These upward directed electrical discharges extend 90-100 km high into the atmosphere. I processed this image from the RAW file, adjusting the white balance, contrast and noise reduction. Full res: flic.kr/p/2rhxqcK

Fascinating ... and a hopeful sign

Paul Voosen@voosen.me · last yr.

The Senate just posted the report language of its FY26 science appropriations bill. This text lays out what they want done and carries the force of law if it is included in the final spending bill. It's a line-by-line refutation of Trump's proposed budget for NASA and NOAA.

🌍 🛰️ 🌱 🌽👨🏿‍🌾🛖💻⚙️ Preprint on national-scale satellite-based crop field delineation in smallholder landscapes is out: doi.org/10.48550/arX... 🌍 🛰️ 🌱 🌽👨🏿‍🌾🛖💻⚙️