Sensors - deployed using satellite, airborne, land/water-based systems - can transform the approach to addressing critical issues related to climate change and sustainability by providing the essential measurements needed, with the spatial and temporal sampling needed, to advance understanding and support the implementation of solutions at local to global scales.

The sessions, all focused on the use of satellite, airborne, and/or ground/land-based sensors, will be organized around the following four thematic areas:

• Freshwater: supporting the needs of people and nature
• Earth hazards, risk, and resilience
• Nature-based climate solutions: tracking land-based carbon stocks and fluxes
• Coastal communities: information for the management of ocean resources

The conference brings together people engaged in the full spectrum of activities required to go from sensors to solutions – the design and development of: novel sensors, new workflows for data analysis/interpretation/visualization, and new computationally efficient methods of data integration. Airborne or land/water-based sensors can provide more direct access to the region of interest and relatively fine spatial and temporal resolution. A key challenge is developing new ways to build, deploy and maintain sensors at costs low enough to have sufficient spatial coverage. Satellite-deployed sensors, while providing limited information about regions beneath the land or water surface, have the tremendous advantage of global scale coverage with repeated temporal sampling. There exist many opportunities to amplify the value of all forms of measurement by integration of data acquired using different types of sensors.

Following the conference, there is a one-day workshop to build an Open Science Community.