The 2025 ESA Living Planet Symposium (LPS25), held in Vienna, provided a high-profile platform for dialogue and exchange within the Earth Observation (EO) community. For the BC team and its partners, the event presented an opportunity to showcase their progress in cloud-native processing, modular workflows and scalable, analysis-ready EO data services.
BC at LPS25 – Innovation, Exchange and Community in Earth Observation
15 staff from Brockmann Consult and 2 colleagues from Brockmann Geomatics were present at LPS in Vienna, while the back-office in Hamburg took care of all organisational aspects and communication. Our company booth was a central meeting place for colleagues, partners and customers. Our timetable was filled with live demonstrations, tutorials, agoras, oral presentations and posters and, of course, a lot of technical and less technical discussions.
So many project and tools teams were able to meet during this week and we also participated in nice social events, e.g. with the GDA Water Resources colleagues, the GDA Public Health team, the SNAP partners or the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service LWQ production team – just to mention some.
Good to see so many partners, colleagues and friends in person, outside the world of online meetings.
Highlights from the Week
Tutorials
Three 90-minute tutorials were held on Sunday. We demonstrated Cloud-Native Earth Observation Processing with SNAP and the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem (CDSE), trained climate researchers in working with ESA Climate Change Data using the CCI Toolbox, and explained to application users how DeepESDL can ease their life as part of the EarthCODE Integrated Platforms. About 50 participants attended each of the tutorials, engaging actively with the topics, and started inspiring discussions. A very good start into the week!
Short Demos at the EO Agora
Throughout the week, we provided a number of short demos at the EO Agoras. Agoras are an informal place to meet, where presenters and audience are closely together and interactive discussions often follow the demo. We engaged with other EO data users and providers, with researchers and environmental managers on urban water quality using SNAP, the new Sentinel EOPF sample service, and contributed to series of Agora sessions on Open Science in the Making with APEx. Every day, these sessions drew strong audiences — underscoring the relevance and curiosity around applied EO tools.
Poster Sessions
Anyone who endured the noise level was rewarded with truly good discussions on numerous topics from all over the world. BC presented 7 posters in total. Special good audience had the poster on forecasting of Water Quality by Machine Learning (Ralf), the Sen2Water poster (Carsten) (yes, Sentinel-2 Level-2 will benefit from a Water Reflectance product!) and the news on SNAP moving towards a Cloud Based Modular App (Tom). All showing us how the future of products and services can look like.
The SNAP T-Shirts — Very Popular!
A fun surprise: the ESA SNAP T-shirts were a hit! When Eirini arrived at the venue midweek, the shirts were already gone — snapped up by attendees excited to represent the open-source spirit. It’s the little things that make the community feel like a community.
Ongoing Contributions and Scientific Talks
In addition to demos and tutorials, our team contributed to the scientific program with presentations on EO data services (e.g., xcube, CDSE, DASIF), cyanobacteria monitoring, urban heat islands, water quality, land cover uncertainty, and more. These talks reflect our commitment to developing open, usable tools for pressing environmental challenges.
Community Engagement
As part of our commitment to transparency and knowledge-sharing, we posted live updates from LPS25 on Bluesky and LinkedIn. The response from the EO community, ranging from demos to talks and tech updates, was energising — and a reminder of the impact of communication beyond the venue.
Conclusion: Gratitude and Outlook
We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the European Space Agency (ESA) for hosting such a vital and well-organised event, and to all the other contributors who make the Earth Observation (EO) community what it is: collaborative, open and deeply committed to using data for a good purpose. LPS25 has inspired us to continue developing tools, sharing knowledge and supporting future climate and Earth observation missions.
Congratulations, you have read until the end! Little quizz in the end – do you know what this is? if you did not manage to pick one at our LPS25 company booth, send us the answer and you can win one of three – it will be posted to you 😊.
Take a look at the slideshow below to see some of
the photos taken at the Living Planet Symposium.
This is a scaled-down version of the BC Earth Gallery video playing in 4K on the screen at our booth.
Download the 4K video here [236.2 MB].
