The European Space Agency will host StatEO26 – The EO for Official Statistics and Policy Indicators Reporting Conference at ESA-ESRIN on 5–7 May 2026. Co-organised with Eurostat (DG ESTAT), JRC, DG DEFIS, DG ENV, EARSC, EEA, OECD, UNSD, FAO, UNECE, the University of Hannover, and Biodiversity Alliance & CIAT, StatEO26 convenes national statistical offices, mapping and environmental agencies, EO providers, researchers and policy stakeholders to accelerate how satellite data feeds official statistics and policy reporting at national and international levels.
Why this conference matters
As governments scale up reporting on sustainability, environment and economy, Earth Observation (EO) offers consistent, timely and spatially rich evidence for indicators—supporting, for example, natural capital accounting, agricultural statistics, land-cover/use reporting, urban metrics, and GHG-related statistics. StatEO26 is designed to translate that promise into operational practice, focusing on methods, standards, uncertainty, and institutional uptake.
Call for abstracts (oral, poster & workshops)
The conference invites oral, poster, and workshop proposals. Submissions are especially welcome from teams demonstrating operational use in statistical production and from the Global South, highlighting capacity gaps and integration pathways with official systems. No special proceedings are foreseen. Submit via the conference portal. Key dates below.
Thematic oral sessions: Authors are encouraged to align with one of these tracks (each with a strong focus on methods, metadata and routes to official uptake):
- Agriculture Statistics — crop type/area, yield, seasonal monitoring, change detection; integration with national crop tables and SDG/SEEA-related outputs.
- Natural Capital Accounting — EO for SEEA ecosystem extent/condition/services; links to air, water, land and ocean accounts with traceable methods.
- EO for SDGs & Environmental Policy Reporting — how EO supports national SDG and biodiversity reporting; processing chains and uncertainty handling.
- Land Use / Land Cover (LULC) — operational classification & change detection; validation, INSPIRE links, reporting units (grid/NUTS), registries.
- People & Urban Areas — population and settlement mapping, access to services, built-up area/green space per capita, heat-island, informal settlements.
- Economy & Infrastructure — transport/industrial footprints, construction activity, night-time lights and other EO proxies for economic statistics.
- Sustainability Indicators — forests, land degradation, biodiversity, emissions; validation, integration with national inventories and official outputs.
Interactive workshopsWorkshops are participatory (e.g., World Café/breakouts) and must deliver actionable recommendations. Propose one of the following:
- User needs & experiences (NSOs, mapping & environment agencies, etc.); success stories, gaps, procurement constraints.
- Integrating in-situ & EO — co-designed calibration/validation, governance, licensing and accessibility.
- Standardisation & quality — aligning EO with statistical quality frameworks, classifications and metadata.
- Trust & uncertainty — transparent methods, quality assessment, replicability and communication of uncertainty.
- Accessibility & interoperability — platforms, policies, metadata; Copernicus and other public EO services in data infrastructure.
- Capacity building — training and institutional development, with an emphasis on low-resource contexts.
- Future steps to operational integration — near-real-time EO, AI/digital twins, and sustaining publicly accessible EO datasets.
Who should contribute
- National Statistical Offices, Mapping & Environment Agencies seeking scalable geospatial methods for official production.
- EO companies and research groups delivering validated products and tools aligned with statistical standards.
- Custodian agencies & international organisations working on comparable indicator frameworks and guidance.
Key dates
- Call opens: 7 Oct 2025
- Submission deadline (oral/poster/workshops): 1 Dec 2025
- Notifications: 26 Jan 2026
- Preliminary programme & registration open: 1 Feb 2026
- Registration closes: 1 Apr 2026
- Final programme: 7 Apr 2026
- Conference: 5–7 May 2026 (Frascati, Italy)
- StatEO26
Venue & contacts
ESA-ESRIN, Largo Galileo Galilei 1, 00044 Frascati, Italy.
Submissions & scientific queries: EO4Society.Conf@esa.int