Workshops
From flight plans to point clouds, from STAC APIs to sovereign AI, this year's workshops are where Australia's EO community gets its hands dirty. Pick a session, bring a laptop, and build something you'll still be using into the future.
Morning Workshops
Agentic AI for Earth Observation: Practical, Sovereign, and Hands-On
A grounded look at how agentic coding tools are changing EO practice, led by Fang Yuan and Adam Roff. Participants work through a real remote sensing task with a browser-based coding agent, moving from simple prompting to more autonomous workflows, while also seeing the same task run on a locally deployed open-weight model. The session is aimed at separating genuine value from hype and covers data sovereignty, governance, and human oversight along the way. No coding agent experience is required.
Afternoon Workshops
Cloud Native Geospatial for Earth Observation
Led by Alex Leith and Will Jones of Auspatious, this Python-based workshop introduces cloud-native geospatial concepts like COGs and the STAC API through hands-on coding. Participants build an EO notebook from scratch using Landsat data, then work through a real-world case study on land productivity metrics tied to UN SDG indicator 15.3.1, plus a sea-surface temperature time series. It closes with a byte-by-byte look at how COG files are structured. Supported by the CEOS Systems Engineering Office.
Satellite Derived Vegetation Products Community of Practice
A 1.5 hour working session continuing the Satellite Derived Vegetation Products Community of Practice established in 2025, led by Stuart Phinn, Poornima Sivanandam, and Luz Angelica Suarez. It centres on the challenge of comparing the growing number of satellite-derived vegetation maps, with working groups tackling collaboration, coordination, data sharing, and cross-sector advocacy. The goal is a set of prioritised, owned actions to publish on the CoP's website.
EO Capacity Building and the NASA AVIRIS Australia Hyperspectral Campaign
Jointly hosted by the Earth Observation Australia Education Working Group and the NASA AVIRIS Australia initiative, this session tackles workforce development across industry, government, and academia. It covers identifying industry skill gaps, the EOA Next Generation Project as a training and translation pipeline, and the upcoming six week AVIRIS-3 hyperspectral airborne campaign across Australia, including how to get involved in flight planning and calibration and validation work.
Fly, Sense, Map: Field-Based Drone Data Collection for Ecosystem Monitoring
Run by the TerraLuma group at the University of Tasmania, this outdoor, hands-on session covers real ecosystem drone surveys using both the compact DJI Mavic 3M and the larger Matrice 350 and 400 platforms with RGB, multispectral, and lidar payloads. Participants plan missions from the ground up, covering flight lines, overlap, sensor calibration, and RTK direct georeferencing, following the openly published DroneScape and NatureScan protocols. It pairs with the afternoon data processing workshop but also stands alone.
Process, Access, Analyse: Hands-On with Analysis-Ready Drone Data
The afternoon companion to "Fly, sense, map," though it can be taken on its own. The first half covers the processing pipeline that turns raw drone imagery and lidar into analysis-ready orthomosaics and point clouds. The rest is hands-on in browser-based Python notebooks, pulling analysis-ready TERN DroneScape and NatureScan data over the STAC API and working with cloud-optimised GeoTIFFs and point clouds without downloading whole files. Participants leave with reusable, self-documented notebooks.