This newly established community promotes the use of free near real-time environmental and Earth Observation data (in-situ, airborne and space based) and derived products to a worldwide user community. Using inexpensive, off-the-shelf equipment, the data can be directly received from communication satellites. This capability, in conjunction with data from freely accessible archives, provides the possibility to obtain a multitude of environmental and Earth Observation related data. This information is highly relevant for various application domains such as weather, atmosphere, oceans, land, vegetation, water and environment.

The Earth Observation community builds on the existing geospatial processing utilities provided by the ILWIS community. The software developed within the EO community can be integrated in the available open source RS-GIS ILWIS software. For further modelling and statistical analysis of spatio-temporal data there is a linkage with the Geostatistics community.