From tracking Arctic ice loss to monitoring crop health and detecting urban flood risk, satellite-based Earth Observation (EO) data holds enormous potential to inform decisions that affect all Canadians. Yet for most users — whether a government analyst, a university researcher, or a small environmental tech company — accessing, processing, and making sense of that data remains a significant challenge.

Digital Earth Canada (DEC) is a Canadian Space Agency-led initiative developed by EarthDaily Analytics built to solve that problem. DEC is a centralized, open, cloud and high-performance computing platform that provides a single point of access to authoritative Canadian and international EO data, paired with powerful tools for analysis, visualization, and application development — including AI and machine learning capabilities.

This session will offer a broad overview of DEC's vision, progress, and potential:
- What DEC is: a "one-stop-shop" for EO data and analytics, co-designed with users across government, academia, and industry to meet the real needs of Canada's diverse EO community.
- Why it matters: comparable platforms in Australia, Europe, Africa, and the United States have already demonstrated how open, shared EO infrastructure accelerates scientific discovery, supports environmental monitoring, and drives downstream economic activity. Canada now has the opportunity to build its own.
- What it can do: from near-real-time lake water quality monitoring and wildlife habitat mapping to annual crop tracking and automated disaster response — DEC's use cases illustrate the breadth of applications it can support.
- Who it's for: researchers, application developers, service engineers, policy analysts, and general users alike — DEC is designed to be accessible regardless of technical background, with user-friendly interfaces alongside advanced programmatic tools.
- The road ahead: DEC is progressing from prototype toward a Minimum Viable Product, with a roadmap that includes expanded data federation, enhanced AI/ML support, and compliance with Government of Canada standards for security and accessibility.

DEC is designed to be more than a technical platform - it is national infrastructure for the data-driven era. This session invites anyone curious about the future of Earth Observation to learn how DEC can serve their work and community.