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In the end of November 2025 Evelyn Uuemaa and Alexander Kmoch visited the New Zealand Institute for Bioeconomy Science Limited (formerly Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research) in Palmerston North.

It was great to explore ways to enhance the efficiency of geospatial data use in environmental research, and we had productive discussions on how to use Discrete Global Grid Systems for mapping and analysing different environmental phenomena.

Alexander Kmoch presenting DGGS.

From November 17 to 23 Evelyn Uuemaa and Alexander Kmoch participated at the global FOSS4G Conference 2025 (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) in Auckland, New Zealand.

At the conference Evelyn and Alexander gave a presentation on the data cube concept, developed under the WaterSmartLand project with the title “Developing a user-oriented data cube for biodiversity and carbon dynamics assessment in Estonia with remote sensing data”.

In addition, Alexander gave a workshop on the topic of “Hands-on DGGS and OGC DGGS-API with DGGRID and pydggsapi Workshop”.

In October and November 2025, our project team hosted three interactive workshops as part of our educational outreach for WaterSmartLand. Minna Ots and Merli Neito from the project team together with Marili Sell from the Root Ecology Lab of the University of Tartu were welcomed to Tartu Mart Reiniku school to explore the fascinating world of soil and water with 6th-grade students.

Although our project primarily focuses on water, we decided to bring another vital element into the spotlight—soil. Why? Because water and soil are deeply interconnected, and understanding this relationship is key to appreciating how ecosystems and the environment function. Our workshop demonstrated how water interacts with different soil types and how vegetation can influence this process.

In the WaterSmartLand project, we’re exploring how Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) can revolutionize large-scale hydrological modeling, making it more efficient, spatial representative and avoiding distortions and constraints that come with typical map projections when building data cubes.

Our collaboration with the leading implementers, developers and scientists on DGGS has led to the specification and development of a webservice that understands DGGS. This work is now recognized as the OGC API - DGGS standard, which is essential for enabling effective communication and functionality across different software systems.

Photo by: Gatis Orlickis

From September 29th to October 3rd 2025, our team was represented at the Big Data from Space 2025 conference (BiDS) organised by the European space Agency (ESA). We had several presentations and presence at an expo area where we showcased our European Research Council (ERC) research project WaterSmartLand using open-source tools.

📌 Alexander Kmoch, Associate Professor in Geoinformatics, made a presentation in the session “Towards Digital Twins: Integrating Data, Models, and Insight” on the topic of “OGC DGGS & Zarr: Building Blocks for Big Data Digital Twins”. In the presentation he demonstrated a novel architecture that combines DGGS with cloud-native Zarr storage to create universal building blocks for EO data management.

In June 2025, our team was represented at Europe’s largest remote sensing conference – the ESA Living Planet Symposium in Vienna and shared our latest advancements in Earth Observation!

As a major step forward in data management and analysis we presented the first version of the data cube.

Presentations were made on following topics:

• “Developing a Data Cube for Biodiversity and Carbon Dynamics Assessment in Estonia with Remote Sensing data” by Oleksandr Borysenko, Jan Pisek, Mirjam Uusõue, Alexander Kmoch, Holger Virro, Wai Tik Chan, Eveli Sisas, Ats Remmelg, Marta Jemeljanova, and Evelyn Uuemaa 🌿📊

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