Big Data for Big Challenges: The Swiss Data Cube for Environmental Monitoring

The rapid changes in our environment and the emergence of big data, call for innovative solutions to support the policy frameworks and related actions toward sustainable development. To address these changes, the University of Zurich and the University of Geneva have joined forces with the UNEP/GRID — Geneva and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) to unleash the power of Big Data for monitoring the Environment with a new technology: the Swiss Data Cube (SDC).

The SDC represents a new paradigm, revolutionizing the way users can interact with complex data originating from many different sources, in particular from Earth observing instruments, such as satellite imagery.

The Davos SDC event will bring together scientists, policy formulators and the private sector to present and discuss the uniqueness of the SDC approach, its underlying technology as well as its broad relevance, serving a wide range of applications for environmental monitoring. The experts will particularly focus on selected key applications based on the SDC towards monitoring various environmental issues and the Sustainable Development Goals. The discussion will focus primarily on biodiversity and its monitoring from space as it has become a major topic of interest and scrutiny including towards the inception of the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

The final objective is to connect emerging challenges and opportunities to environmental monitoring at the crossroads of science, policy and society to achieve agile governance for all communities.

Websites:
University of Geneva
University of Zürich