My name is Marcin Harold, I'm from Wageningen University, I'm a professor here for remote sensing and geo-information. And I work mostly on global land and forest assessments using this observation data.

So a lot of the developments in this field, signal driven, happen in the research and the technology domain. That's what it's the nature of it, we see a lot of development, lots of opportunities created there. But over the last years, we've really made a step towards the users, a good example is the establishment of the Copernicus services, which are not research technology oriented,

but they're really user oriented, delivering information to what people ask for. And so while this is an evolving field, there will be a lot of the developments will still remain in the research and the technology and the R&D domain. But I think the user base in terms of people needing the kind of information they're

producing is enhancing also the new opportunities. And so that having a good dialogue, having a good interaction there is one of the key areas that will show or will create success in the impact that we aim for as a community. First of all, we need to be confident about all the information we are providing, we

need to be confident ourselves. I'll be producing information that we can trust, we can put out to the world and to the users. And that's the first step. I think we have done quite a way on that. I think we have quite some confidence now with only having the information and having them well validated, but also having them free and open and all of these things are really building the foundation to really make them available to the users.

And I think that's the second thing that we'll have to trust with the users in the sense that they have certain need that might be new or that need might have been served from a different data source, for example. There's a need also on the users that can rethink a bit to try to make use of these

new opportunities. And that's a bit of a process that requires also change of behavior at the user side. There's education, there's a technology transfer, there is a partnership, a collaboration requirement that comes along with that. I mean, like I said, the need for data is increasing, we have all the problems, sustainability,

climate change, we need clean water, we need low pollution, all of these things. And if you want to do better in these things, it's clear that those observation data are needed for these kinds of things. But to get them to the point where they are useful, we've made progress, but I think

there's still room to do better there. So ideally, where we want to be is a bit like in terms of the weather forecast, everybody has an app and looks at it, we also have the land monitoring, that's where we also want to be as the information quickly available about what people concerns are. Of course, we might not check it every day, but you might want to check in our neighborhood,

you might want to check European wide, how is the environment, what's the pollution today, what's critically happening in my neighborhood, right? Is there some certain degradation process going on or stuff like that? I mean, that's where we want to enable basically everybody and empower everybody to be aware of that situation.

And the open data and the Earth observation approach, having maps and having visuals is very helpful in that. So we should take that to our advantage. And the key, let's say, advantage we have is we need to have timely data, we really have information that is pretty much up to date, and we can provide them relatively quickly and really also provide information or alert about, you know, certain things

that are of interest to everyone. I mean, it's not always that easy, because information, you know, getting the right information to provide people at the right point is not that straightforward. So I think that we need systems that can do that.

But I think these development forecasting, for example, and these kind of things are good models. I think we should also look into the land monitoring domain for us.