Terra em Foco brings together more than 200 participants in Braga
The Portuguese Space Agency brings together companies, academia and public administration to debate challenges and advances in the Earth Observation sector.
If the future of humanity “is nothing but a continuum of questions”, what answers should we look for to alleviate doubts and overcome challenges? Part of the solution to today’s problems lies in cooperation and space. That’s why the 2024 edition of the National Earth Observation Conference – Terra em Foco (Earth in Focus) is a “particularly important moment, allowing interaction between different sectors and different approaches”, said the Dean of the University of Minho, Rui Vieira de Castro, at the event’s opening session.
The biannual conference, created and promoted by the Portuguese Space Agency in 2022, takes place this Thursday and Friday at the University of Minho’s Gualtar Campus in Braga. The event’s second edition has more than 200 registered participants and half a hundred speakers, divided into various parallel sessions and an exhibition of posters.
For Ricardo Conde, president of the Portuguese Space Agency, this year’s conference has become the “event of excellence for the national Earth Observation community”. “It’s a crucial moment that brings together a diverse audience from academia, industry or defence. There is an almost uninterrupted sharing of knowledge and experiences. Promoting these interactions is always one of the Agency’s main objectives,” he said on the sidelines of the thematic sessions on the first day of the event. On the other hand, Ricardo Conde recalled that from the outset, the Portuguese Space Agency committed to sustainability, “a theme that marks the agenda of Terra em Foco and almost all of the organisation’s initiatives”.
The same was stressed by Pedro Arezes, president of the University of Minho’s School of Engineering (EEUM), which this year joined the Portuguese Space Agency in organising the conference. For Pedro Arezes, recent years have shown that “the major challenges facing society today and in the near future will require universities in particular to be more adaptable and resilient”. As such, he added, EEUM has been preparing itself to anticipate future challenges, focusing on areas such as Aerospace Engineering (the Minho Academy opened a degree programme in this area in 2022) and Data Science.
The opening session was also attended by Olga Pereira, a Braga city councillor, who emphasised the need for “urgent intervention” in response to the effects of climate change, pointing out that Earth in Focus is an “additional step towards discussing a better and more sustainable future”.
The first day of the conference also included presentations by Juliette Lambin, head of the Future Missions and Architecture Department (EOP-F) at the European Space Agency (ESA), José António Sobriño, director of the Climate Change Unit at the University of Valencia, and Ana Fonseca, former director of the Applied Geodesy Unit at the National Civil Engineering Laboratory (LNEC). The researcher and co-author of the book Remote Sensing, published in 2004, gave a retrospective of the Portuguese Earth Observation sector. She was honoured at the event for her contributions to the industry.
In her presentation, Ana Fonseca recalled the use of earth observation data in the seismological characterisation of the Monte Real area in 1994, for the installation of the Badajoz-Leiria gas pipeline or, more recently, in the monitoring of infrastructures such as the Porto Metro or the Altice Arena in Lisbon, as well as focusing on the importance of satellites in responding to disaster situations.
The National Earth Observation Conference – Earth in Focus ends this Friday, 13 September, with the Best Paper and Best Student Poster awards. Beforehand, there is still time for debates and presentations on issues such as the impact of Artificial Intelligence on Earth Observation or funding instruments and internationalisation opportunities for players in the sector.
During the afternoon, participants can also take part in various practical sessions where they will learn how to work with different tools such as the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem to analyse Sentinel-2 images, learn about new trends and concepts such as STAC applied to Earth Observation or even how to find business opportunities in international organisations.
