A Global Gathering for Open Science
What happens when you put a room full of open-source geospatial experts together, and then give them time to discuss, share, and present? At AGU25 in New Orleans, 21000+ researchers and practitioners from 100+ countries came together under the theme “Where Science Connects Us” to share work that connects data to decisions across Earth science and environmental challenges. We explored innovative approaches to make geospatial research more reproducible, more scalable, and more open.
Fernando Pérez, BIDS Faculty Director, in collaboration with a cross-institutional team, convened experts from around the world to deliver a workshop, a town hall, a poster session, and an oral presentation session. In our town hall, hosted by the GeoJupyter and Cloud-Native Geospatial communities we asked "Is Your Data-Intensive Earth Science Research Tool Kit Open, Efficient, Resilient to Change, and Leading to Real-World Impact?" This open discussion format gave us an opportunity to better understand what challenges the geospatial community is facing and identify ideas for overcoming them.
Fernando Pérez, BIDS Faculty Director and DSE Faculty Director, presenting at the Town Hall.
Empowering Earth Science with Open Infrastructure
Our presentation session, Open Source Geospatial Workflows in the Cloud: Tools and Techniques for Data Access, Analysis, Visualization, Storytelling, and Sharing in the Python and Jupyter ecosystem, invited participants to share their open source Earth Science work either through a poster or an oral presentation. Our speakers included Fernando Pérez, speaking on streamlining the lifecycle of geospatial research in the Jupyter ecosystem with the GeoJupyter community; Julia Lowndes and Amy Steiker speaking on Openscapes, the extensible social infrastructure enabling NASA Earthdata science in the cloud; and Tasha Snow, sharing about CryoCloud and lessons learned building interoperable research communities with Jupyter.
Dr. Tasha Snow presenting at our Oral Presentation Session.
We also ran a full-day workshop where participants learned to work on an open cloud platform with JupyterHub, analyzed and explored data with tools like JupyterGIS and leafmap, worked in a fully collaborative environment with Jupyter Notebook and JupyterGIS, authored technical content with MyST and Jupyter Book, and shared their research outcomes, including journal publications, websites, and blog posts. All our materials are openly available at our workshop website
Participants listening to a presentation by Dr. Qiusheng Wu at the workshop.
We are most impactful when we are connected. Our team - a Berkeley collaboration between BIDS and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment and are proud to be creating and sustaining spaces where experts can work together to solve some of the biggest challenges facing our world. The thousands of posters conveyed innovative technical and social solutions. We particularly enjoyed learning with our friends at Astera - who are optimizing access to distributed scientific datasets to power performant, interoperable, and sustainable geospatial workflows.
Dr. Shane Grigsby and Dr. Thomas Teisberg showing their work.
Looking Ahead
The week at AGU25 reflected an incredible amount of innovation, effort, care, and momentum across the open-source community. Thank you to every speaker, presenter, participant, and organizer who helped make these sessions both fun and meaningful. We are excited for what’s next in open-source and geospatial science, and for the people building a better future together.
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