Radiant Earth Foundation’s 2018 Annual Report — Good Wishes for 2019!

By Anne Hale Miglarese Founder and CEO, Radiant Earth Foundation

I am pleased to present Radiant Earth Foundation’s 2018 Annual Report, documenting our journey connecting the global development community to Earth imagery and tools, as well as supporting the advancement of a vibrant cohort of spatial data users worldwide.

2018 proved to be another exciting year for Radiant Earth Foundation, in particular with the launch of our open source satellite imagery platform. The platform marked a key milestone of our original commitment to provide license-free data and tools to people around the world. We designed targeted educational resources to help socialize users to the different features of the platform, showcasing what is possible with remotely sensed data. We also strengthened our collaborations with existing partners through joint projects and formed new alliances to support community-led projects. The establishment ofMLHub Earth, an open source machine learning commons for Earth observation, is one of those collaborations, formed to promote the creation of inclusive labeled images and algorithms to democratize machine learning applications for Earth observation data.

We anticipated that the Earth observation landscape would continue to expand and innovate, and subsequently leveraged our expertise as a neutral entity to bring together the right voices to further reduce the friction in the workflow of geospatial data. Our leadership and investment led to the advancements of standards and tools that make archival data more accessible such as theSpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) and Analysis Ready Data.

Our priorities in 2019 are equally ambitious. Not only will we expand the Radiant Earth platform’s functionality to enable large scale spatio-temporal analysis and integrate new imagery and non-imagery data sources; We will also publish the first open image training libraries for land cover and crop types, as well as operationalize the MLHub library for public access.

Equally important for 2019 is strengthening our capacity building program, born out of the observation that the capacity to use and analyze remote sensing data is fundamental to empowering the global development community to make data driven decision making.

Radiant Earth Foundation enters 2019 knowing that we’re in a position to build on our success in 2018 and we invite you to join us on our journey.