Reflections from the 2025 Living Planet Symposium

It was amazing attending the Living Planet Symposium last week (21–27 June 2025) in Vienna.

Smart Biomass Modeling Toolkit – AI.Geolabs

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Webinar - HydroPatterns: Advancing Open Surface Water Monitoring in Alberta with Artificial Intelligence & Remote Sensing. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

About the Presentation: The distribution and fluctuation of open surface water in lentic (standing) water bodies (i.e., lakes, reservoirs, ponds, dugouts, and wetlands) are shifting rapidly in response to climate change and human alterations to catchments. Monitoring lentic open surface water dynamics is both important and urgent—not just for long-term trends, but also to capture short-term fluctuations. The HydroPatterns pilot project, conducted in two pilot areas (one in the boreal region and one in the prairies), leveraged open-access Sentinel optical and radar satellite imagery, machine learning, and cloud-based technologies to map open surface water on Alberta’s landscape at a monthly scale and 10-meter resolution, achieving over 90% overall accuracy. Compared to existing surface water dynamics products, the fully automated HydroPatterns workflow offers improved edge delineation, detects a greater numbers of small water features (<1 ha), and identifies more non-permanent water features. By providing both intra- and inter-annual inundation frequency metrics, along with month-to-month variations in water extent, the HydroPatterns can be scaled up province-wide to support data-driven decision-making for water and wetland management and conservation efforts. Presenter’s Bio: Thuy Doan is a remote sensing scientist at the ABMI with a background in grassland ecology. She began her career applying remote sensing and GIS techniques to develop vegetation management plans, conserve the iconic plains bison, and map the remaining native grasslands in the Saskatchewan prairies. In April 2023, Thuy joined the Earth Observation Insight Unit within the ABMI’s Geospatial Centre. Since then, she has been working with the team using satellite imagery and a range of geospatial tools and technologies to support habitat mapping and monitoring across Alberta’s diverse landscapes.

Watch live: Living Planet Symposium 2025

One of the biggest Earth observation conferences in the world will take place next week in Vienna. You can watch streamed plenary discussions and presentations each day on ESA Web TV.