I'm Remus Leutzer and I've been involved in this field already since my studies in the 90s. Since 2010, I was already involved in the delegations of ESA on the technical and the scientific things of ESA.

Three years ago, I moved to the Mellon Space Office. There I'm working as a data expert, a data infrastructure expert. That's my base. I'm an expert on some of the Copernicus services, including the land service.

I'm still continuing the work on the Earth observation program of ESA. I'm also now coordinating the Horizon Europe space theme in the Netherlands. It was really restricted to the research community and to the public organizations using this data.

Even at the public organizations, the reuse was low. The last five years, we really see that there is a difference. Yes, the research community is far, most far with the use of them.

I limit now to remote sensing data. But what you see is that more and more public organizations start to use it in their operational projects. What we also see is that, especially in the Netherlands, and I think there are more countries, that there are many companies now in the geoscience field.

Not only in the remote sensing geoscience field, but also the broader geoscience field. One good example in the Netherlands, and I know that's very well because I've worked at the meteorological institute, because the weather is really coming to you. For example, we have the rain radar in the Netherlands, which was also open data,

which is also based on open data now. But that's really what everybody is using. In the Netherlands, we have a shower radar, and everybody uses that and takes that for granted.

That's because the information is coming that close. A nice example, last week I finally could install solar panels on my roof, and then I saw that the companies were really using the open data I made open in the last five years

to give me good advice. For example, in the Netherlands, we have the altitude information, the LiDAR, they call it actual altitude database in the Netherlands. It's based on LiDAR data, and in the Netherlands, we have half a meter resolution,

the altitude is efficient. So, they use that data set to see the roof and to see how they can locate the panels, and then they combine it with the cadastral information from the cadastral organization, the Cadastral in the Netherlands, which is open data, and then they combine it with some general information from KNMI about the climate,

how much sun hours you can expect on that location. And then you see that the information is used, and it's coming close, and people need solar panels. If you ask a land user what he wants, then he thinks about Google Maps,

and then maybe, and that's most of the time, in some countries, that's already aerial photographs, so the spatial resolution is very high. So, that's the first thing they expect. Okay, spatial resolution in Google Maps is high,

but the spectral resolution, the extra information you need about, for example, vegetation, etc., is low. So, yeah, they want something like Google Maps, but if you then come with a Sentinel-2 image with 10-meter resolution, they think, oh, it's this for blurry thing. And you really need good consultants and good experts

that can teach these people that this information can be useful, and also you can solve that maybe by combining different data sets. Use the lower resolution Sentinel-2 data,

but merge this very high-resolution data, and give them information on plot scale that they can understand and that they trust. And, yeah, there are even landowners now using drones, and that's even higher resolution, and then the step is even bigger.

And that's one thing. And if you want to use a global data set on a very local level, then, yeah, most of these data sets have been processed to, for example, 20 classes that you can use globally.

So, you have a general class, forest, a triplet, bare ground, etc. If you go to the local scale, you need more classes, especially if you want to help the landowners. So, you need to give them customized products.

And you cannot make customized products for the entire globe, so that's not an option. But if you have a big data set available in the cloud, and you can, for subsets, you can process the high-resolution, customized products, that would be a solution.

But you need the infrastructure for that. I think there are different user communities, of course. If you look at the public authorities, and their use of this information, and the limitation was for many years,

that most satellite missions were limited in time. They were either scientific or, yeah, there was no continuation. And now with the Copernicus program, we have this continuation. It's really, if satellites don't break down,

it's really, we have the funding, and we have the technical stuff now available to continue the whole program up to 2030. And there's now really the feeling that we have to continue it. And even now, yes, I know climate change already for 15 years,

but the last two years, it became really something in the public. And then, now you see that people start realizing, hey, I see sea level change, sea level change, I see melting snow caps. Without environmental data, remote sensing data,

we shouldn't have this. People didn't know that. And I think that's also with the user uptake. If you want to go to the general public, you need information that they recognize. And now, yeah, with the climate change really coming out to the general public,

I expect that more people would like to have this information, and also not only the research institutes. And regarding the climate change, it's interesting to have a look at the climate portal of ESA, because they really made a new portal with a nice interface

showing all the different global datasets of climate change. This is one step further.