Empowering Conservation Through Open Technologies with 52°North and PEOPLE-ECCO
The Challenge
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are key actors in the conservation and restoration of ecosystems worldwide. However, practice-oriented conservation groups face a major hurdle: evaluating the real-world impact of their management activities over large geographic areas. Traditional monitoring methods rely on labor-intensive on-the-ground surveys, which are difficult to sustain at scale. While satellite Earth Observation (EO) data, such as Copernicus Sentinel-2, offer wide-scale coverage and long-term time series, using them effectively requires complex domain knowledge, spatial data handling, and specialized data processing skills.
This week’s challenge is:
How can we build an accessible, cloud-native web platform that transforms complex satellite Earth Observation data into intuitive environmental indicators and actionable metrics for non-technical conservation experts?