Philippe Rufin

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...

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

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...

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/...

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!

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

Portrait of Dr. Valerie L. Thomas, the pioneering Black NASA scientist and inventor, smiling warmly at the camera. She has shoulder-length wavy gray hair, wears thin gold-framed glasses, gold hoop earrings, and a light gray herringbone-patterned blazer over a white top with a small pin on the lapel, standing confidently against a neutral gray background.

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! 🌍🌽💧

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

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! ❤️

YouTube video by The Leadership Lab Earth Observed | Episode 1: Bill Greer | How Nonprofit Satellites Could Change Everything

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.

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

Header Image of Maize field with a picture of Esther Shupel Ibrahim and text: Research for Smallholder Farmers' Food Security in Nigeria

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

Photograph taken from the International Space Station by astronaut Nichole Ayers, capturing a rare gigantic jet — an upward lightning discharge shooting from a thunderstorm about 90-100 km high into the upper atmosphere. The jet appears as a vivid purple and blue column of light that finely branches out toward the top where it turns into a vivid red color. It's rising from a brightly illuminated cloud top, surrounded by diffuse city lights from Northern Mexico and South Texas. Behind it is the curved limb of Earth with a green band from the airglow layer indicating the edge of the atmosphere. A portion of the space station’s robotic arm is visible in the foreground.

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

Joint effort by Pauline Hammer, Leon-Friedrich Thomas, Sá Nogueira Lisboa, Natasha Ribeiro, Almeida Sitoe, @hostertp.bsky.social & Patrick Meyfroidt! Thanks to Descartes Labs and @esa.int for providing access to SPOT6/7 data, and the F.R.S.-FNRS for funding the research!

Our team had the opportunity to access SPOT6/7 data (1.5 m resolution) for Mozambique! We produced ~21 million individual field delineations for 2023, which allow unique insights into the spatial distribution of agriculture, field size and the linkages between agriculture and forest cover change!

The reason behind it is oftentimes constrained access to satellite imagery at very high spatial resolution needed in these systems (also see bsky.app/profile/phil...).

The literature on field delineation in smallholder systems remains relatively scarce and progress is slow overall (although cudos to the colleagues working on it). Therefore we don´t have field delineations at policy-relevant scales (e.g. national) where they are most needed.

Smallholder-dominated landscapes are entirely different from the mechanized and consolidated landscapes (which are oftentimes considered for benchmarking AI models).

Drone capture from Mozambique illustrating the landscape complexity in smallholder landscapes.

Despite free access to petabytes of satellite data, cloud computing platforms, and a wealth of high-performing computer vision models, satellite-based field delineation simply doesn´t work in landscapes dominated by smallholders (fragmented, heterogeneous, and dynamic)!

National-scale map of mean field size across Mozambique. Selected zoom ins provide details on individual fields.

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

We have decided to ban the use of GenAI for research, writing & creative work at our organization.

In fact, we make people sign an agreement saying that their research, analysis, writing, and creative work are *theirs* and not done by GenAI.

Peer review meltdown in one diagram.

Greater emphasis on glamour journals leads people to try their luck with mediocre papers. This drains the review pool (they often have to be re-reviewed elsewhere). That drops the accuracy of peer review, creating more incentive to submit mediocre papers…

U.S. House Subcommittee Rejects Proposed NASA Budget Cuts | Aviation Week Network A U.S. House subcommittee on July 15 voted to reject NASA funding cuts contained in the White House’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal.

U.S. House Subcommittee Rejects Proposed NASA Budget Cuts aviationweek.com/space/budget... #NASA

The data cover 19 EU countries with up to 17 years of annual data. It includes detailed crop codes, farm identifiers, and organic cultivation status—crucial for analysing land-use changes and farming practices

Field and farm-level data on agricultural land use for the European Union - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Field and farm-level data on agricultural land use for the European Union

A comprehensive field- and farm-level land-use dataset from the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) is now available: doi.org/10.1038/s415... #OpenData #EUAgri #LandUse #SustainableFarming

To enhance sustainable development goal research, open up commercial satellite image archives | PNAS To enhance sustainable development goal research, open up commercial satellite image archives

#LPS25 was a fantastic experience but let´s take a step back and reflect on the potential (and the role) of commercial EO data providers in contributing to pressing #sustainability challenges. Here´s a short recap of arguments from the scientific community: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Announcement for upcoming Earth Observation Lab contribution at living planet symposium 2025: Schneidereit et al.: High resolution reconstructions of Pan-European woody cover timeseries from 1990-2024 Session: A.02.04 Advances in Monitoring and Management of Forest Ecosystems - PART 6 Where: Hall F2 When: Friday 27.06.25 / 11:30 h

#LPS25 wildE presentation on High resolution reconstructions of Pan-European woody cover timeseries from 1990-2024 by Shawn Schneidereit upcoming in Hall F2 at 11:30h!