Ecodatacube.eu: analysis-ready open environmental data cube for Europe

Area of Science:

• Earth Observation
• Geospatial Data Science
• Environmental Monitoring

Background:

• Satellite data availability and processing challenges hinder large-scale spatiotemporal analysis.
• A consistent, analysis-ready dataset is crucial for advancing machine learning applications in environmental science.
• Open-access data initiatives are vital for democratizing scientific research and fostering collaboration.

Purpose of the Study:

• To create an analysis-ready, open-access European data cube integrating Landsat, Sentinel-2, and digital terrain model (DTM) data.
• To provide a harmonized, multidimensional feature space for continental-scale spatiotemporal machine learning tasks.
• To assess the accuracy and usability of the data cube components for environmental applications.

Main Methods:

• Systematic spatiotemporal harmonization, compression, and imputation of missing values for satellite data.
• Aggregation of Sentinel-2 and Landsat reflectance into quarterly averages and percentiles to capture seasonal variance.
• Imputation of missing Landsat data using a temporal moving window median (TMWM) approach, with accuracy assessed across different European regions.

Main Results:

• The data cube successfully integrates Landsat, Sentinel-2, and DTM data, offering a consistent spatiotemporal feature space.
• The temporal moving window median (TMWM) imputation method showed varying accuracy across Europe, performing better in Southern Europe than in mountainous regions.
• Land cover classification experiments demonstrated that utilizing the full data cube (including DTM, Landsat, and Sentinel-2) yields the highest classification accuracy.

Conclusions:

• The developed European data cube significantly enhances the accessibility and usability of satellite and terrain data for spatiotemporal machine learning.
• The comprehensive dataset, available under a CC-BY license, supports a wide range of environmental research and monitoring applications.
• The EcoDataCube platform provides a valuable resource for researchers, offering open vegetation, soil, and land use/land cover (LULC) maps alongside the core data cube.