Earth Observation Australia Awards 2026
The Earth Observation Australia (EOA) Awards highlight and celebrate the individuals and organisations building the Australian Earth observation community and its capabilities.
In this context, EO communities and capabilities include all types of industry, government, university, education, non-government, and community/social enterprises.
We welcome nominations from people and organisations who show outstanding performance, leadership and achievements relating to Earth observation, including but not limited to technical capability, management and leadership, administration, mentoring, research, education and training, national and international collaboration.
Award winners will be invited to participate in future EOA activities to further showcase their award in the coming year.
EOA actively supports and promotes an inclusive culture across the EO community and encourages nominations that reflect the diversity of our community.
Nominations for the 2026 EOA Awards!
Award recipients will be announced on 10 November at the AEO forum 2026.
Significant Contribution to the Development of the Australian Earth Observation Community
Awarded to an individual who has made a significant and sustained contribution to activities that have enhanced and promoted the Australian EO community and/or its capabilities.
This contribution may be in any aspect of Earth observation such as leadership, research activities, significant contribution to industry or education, etc.
Dr Melissa Fedrigo
Dr. Melissa Fedrigo is a dedicated and highly effective leader in Australian Earth Observation, celebrated for her proactive ingenuity and ability to deliver transformative remote-sensing capabilities in extreme environments. Melissa brings people together, collaborating with teams across AAD, CSIRO, Defence and international space bodies to turn complex logistics into shared national assets. She champions the use of SAR data for all-season polar monitoring, led the development of helicopter-mounted LiDAR for Antarctic surface mapping, and established vital radar calibration target networks across Antarctica and sub-Antarctic Heard Island. Her work bridges geodetic engineering with field operations, securing essential ground-truth capability for both Australian researchers and international space missions. Melissa’s constructive leadership and technical vision keep Australian polar Earth Observation at the global forefront.
Prof Marta Yebra
Professor Yebra is an internationally recognised EO scientist whose work has helped advance the use of EO for bushfire preparedness and environmental management in Australia. Over more than 15 years, she has developed approaches for monitoring vegetation moisture and flammability that have progressed from research to operational capability, including the Australian Flammability Monitoring System and the 20-metre Fuel Moisture Content product delivered through Geoscience Australia’s Digital Earth Australia. As Director of the ANU Bushfire Research Centre of Excellence, she leads national and international initiatives connecting EO science with fire management, including OzFuel and the CEOS Wildfire Pilot II fuel-dryness activity. She has also contributed to Australian EO strategy through the Australian Space Agency Bushfire EO Taskforce and EO Technical Advisory Group. Her leadership spans research, education, mentoring and Indigenous collaboration, and her standing is reflected in invited plenaries at IGARSS and the EO Forum, alongside national and international awards.
Alex Leith
Alex Leith is the founder and Executive Director of Auspatious, an Australian cloud-native geospatial company, and has spent fifteen years making Earth observation data work for the people who need it most. At Geoscience Australia he led the software and data engineering teams behind Digital Earth Australia and Digital Earth Africa. As Deputy Director of the Australian Ocean Data Network, he directed Australia's national marine data capability. He now leads technical strategy for Digital Earth Pacific, which serves 26 Pacific Island Countries and Territories. Alex is a dedicated community builder. He is the Treasurer for Earth Observation Australia, Secretary of OSGeo Oceania, a member of the STAC Steering Council, Co-Chair of Global FOSS4G 2025 in Auckland and Co-Convenor of the Advancing Earth Observation Forum 2026. Through training, mentoring and open-source advocacy, he has championed open, cloud-native Earth observation across Australia and the region.
Early-Career Contribution to the Development of the Australian Earth Observation Community
Awarded to an individual, who has worked in Earth observation for no more than 5 years, for contributions that have developed, or have significant potential to be developed and deployed and/or shape or change Australian EO.
The winner will show significant potential for future excellence or leadership.
Arnick Abdollahi
Dr. Arnick Abdollahi is an emerging Australian leader at the intersection of Earth observation (EO), data-centric AI, space technology, and environmental intelligence. He designs scalable and trustworthy systems that combine remote sensing, AI, climate scenario modelling, and geospatial analytics to help governments, industries, and communities anticipate and respond to climate and environmental challenges. His research has delivered tools and decision-support systems for bushfire hazards, drought resilience, sustainable agriculture, climate adaptation, and ecosystem management, while strengthening Australia's Earth observation capabilities. Beyond research, he actively builds the EO community through national and international collaborations, mentoring and educating the next generation of EO professionals, and translating scientific advances into real-world impact. Recognised through the Australian Space Awards, Australian AI Awards, and global recognition among the World's Top 2% Scientists, Dr. Abdollahi represents a new generation of innovators shaping the future of Australian EO, space technology, and responsible AI-enabled societal and environmental decision-making.
Zachary Walls
Zachary Walls is Principal Software Engineer and co-founder at Terrabit, the Brisbane geospatial company behind Albatross. Albatross is an enterprise platform that brings satellite tasking across 60+ satellites, Australian processing, a spatio-temporal data catalogue and ML-assisted analytics into one place. Zachary entered Earth observation in 2021 working at a satellite imagery company as sales support while studying Computer Science at the University of Queensland. Within a year of graduating he was leading the development of Albatross now used by multiple Fortune Global 500 companies, Traditional Owner organisations and research universities. His work spans machine learning for change and object detection, flood modelling, raster processing and web mapping. Zachary is driven by making high-resolution satellite data simple to order, understand and use and he shares that knowledge through free technical guides for Australia’s Earth observation community.
Amy Stone
Amy Stone is an emerging Earth Observation scientist whose research is advancing the mapping, monitoring and understanding of Australia's coastal ecosystems. Since graduating with a Master of Environmental Science from The University of Western Australia in 2022, Amy has developed innovative approaches that integrate drone, aerial and satellite Earth observation data with machine learning to map coral reefs, mangroves, saltmarshes, microbial mats and other intertidal habitats. Her work has produced state-significant habitat mapping products used by government agencies to support environmental assessment and coastal management. Amy has contributed to some of the most comprehensive assessments of intertidal ecosystems undertaken in north-western Australia. Her research has also provided the first broad-scale mapping of tropical saltmarsh and microbial mat ecosystems in the region, improving understanding of these important but previously overlooked coastal habitats. Amy is recognised as an outstanding early-career spatial analyst with strong potential to become a future leader in coastal Earth observation and environmental monitoring.
Adriana Parra Ruiz
Adriana Parra Ruiz is a Postdoctoral Fellow with CSIRO Space and Astronomy whose research applies Earth observation to some of Australia’s most challenging environmental monitoring problems. Her work combines optical, Synthetic Aperture Radar and LiDAR observations with cloud computing and machine learning to understand changes in ecosystem extent, vegetation structure and biomass. At CSIRO, Adriana supports the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Biodiversity Study Team and is developing scalable approaches for ecosystem extent mapping using multi-source EO data. Her research in the Great Western Woodlands has demonstrated the value of combining optical and radar observations for ecosystem mapping, while her broader work spans forest disturbance, biomass dynamics and coastal wetland monitoring. Adriana brings an unusual combination of ecological understanding and advanced EO capability to the Australian community and is developing a research profile strongly aligned with the next generation of operational environmental monitoring.
Madeleine Seehaber
Madeleine Seehaber is a Data Scientist in FrontierSI’s Insights team, where she helps turn Earth observation (EO) and spatial data into useful products people can trust. Since joining FrontierSI as an intern in 2021, she has helped author tutorials for Digital Earth Africa and enhanced Python-based Jupyter notebooks that make the Open Data Cube easier to use. She has helped produce EO-derived datasets for groundwater dependent vegetation mapping for Rio Tinto and BHP, produced validation data for the award-winning First Floor Heights (FFH) project, and supports ENVestigator, FrontierSI’s EO platform for environmental monitoring, through testing, training and technical documentation. She also connects technical work to the people who use it, through stakeholder engagement and requirements gathering on the Gayini Data Hub and FloodCheck. Madeleine holds a Bachelor of Science (Geospatial, Honours) from RMIT. She serves on FrontierSI’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee and advises others on career pathways in the spatial sector.
Mirabdualla Mirsodikov
Mirabdulla Mirsodikov is a Master of Geospatial Science candidate at RMIT University with over 2.5 years of professional experience in satellite remote sensing, Digital Elevation Modelling (DEM), and multispectral image classification. Previously a Senior Specialist at Uzbekistan’s Center for Space Monitoring, he managed national agricultural programs and collaborated with Airbus on the Geoferma project. Currently based in Melbourne, Mirabdulla actively contributes to the Australian Earth Observation (EO) landscape, having co-developed GeoLab—a satellite platform for monitoring Kakadu National Park’s mangroves—securing 3rd place at the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2025 (Melbourne). Internationally recognized with the "El-Yurt Umidi" Scholarship, IEEE GRSS Travel Grants, LIESMARS Summer School Grant (Wuhan University), and scholarships for the 2nd NZ Radar Remote Sensing School and AEO Forum 2026, Mirabdulla also serves as the National Point of Contact (NPoC) for Uzbekistan in the Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC), bridging global space leadership with regional EO priorities.
Postgraduate Student Award
Awarded to a recent PhD or Masters gradudate who has completed research that makes a substantial contribution to EO concepts and theory, technology, methods, and/or applications. Nominees must have completed their research at an Australian higher education institution within the past 2 years.
Muhammad Zia Ur Rehman
Muhammad Zia Ur Rehman is a PhD researcher at Edith Cowan University specialising in artificial intelligence for Earth observation. His thesis, “Deep Learning Based Multimodal Representation and Fusion for Land Cover Classification Using Remote Sensing Imagery,” develops methods that combine hyperspectral imagery and LiDAR to improve land-cover mapping. His doctoral research comprises eight first-author studies, with seven papers published or accepted in international journals and conferences, including Artificial Intelligence Review, IEEE JSTARS, and IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. His research advances methods for addressing spatial variability and integrating complementary information from different remote sensing modalities. Related work also extends attention-based learning to Martian landslide segmentation. Beyond his doctoral research, Muhammad contributes to an Edith Cowan University project focused on peatland mapping in the Walpole region of Western Australia, using satellite imagery and field observations. This work further connects his expertise in remote sensing with practical applications in environmental monitoring and land management..
Yi Yu
Yi Yu is an associate lecturer at the University of Sydney and a member of the OzFlux Steering Committee. Yi completed his PhD under an academic collaboration between the Australian National University and CSIRO. His doctoral research developed an integrated Earth observation framework for monitoring and understanding agricultural drought in Australia, linking satellite data with flux tower and ground measurements across scales. Advances in data fusion, cross-platform calibration and soil moisture upscaling connected technical development with scientific hypotheses and field-scale agricultural assessment. Yi’s current research interests focus on developing hybrid approaches that integrate physical and data-driven methods to better understand terrestrial water–carbon coupling across spatiotemporal scales, particularly under climate extremes such as drought.
Innovation in Earth Observation Made by a Group, Company, or Organisation
Awarded for innovation in Earth observation by a group, company, or organisation for a project, product, initiative, or activity conducted within the past 2 years that has made a significant contribution to Australian Earth observation capabilities and/or community.
ICEYE Australia
ICEYE operates a constellation of over 80 synthetic aperture radar satellites that image the Earth through cloud, smoke and darkness. In Australia, ICEYE has a team of more than 10 employees across New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland. The team delivers two flood products: Flood Rapid Intelligence and Flood Insights. Flood Rapid Intelligence provides flood extent updates based on satellite observation every six hours. Flood Insights adds water depth estimates and impact assessments. Both are built on observed data, not what-if projections. ICEYE has supported over 35 flood events in Australia, and more than 75 Australian organisations across government and the private sector use the data. During Tropical Cyclone Alfred, ICEYE mapped a flood footprint of 178,175 square kilometres across three states. ICEYE also works with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) on calibration and validation of Earth observation data.
Aniterra
Aniterra Pty Ltd is a Melbourne based company building a deterministic reasoning engine for Earth observation data selection in Australian environmental compliance. Before any data is purchased or captured, it assesses whether a satellite or aerial source, spectral band or derived product can resolve the measurement a compliance task requires, in every Australian state and territory. Its knowledge base encodes about 50 peer reviewed and official sources spanning six analytical methods, five environmental contexts, and contaminated land assessment across four phases and seven contamination types. Every verdict traces to a published source or regulatory instrument, turning repeated specialist research into a reproducible, auditable output. Practitioners avoid buying data that cannot resolve the required measurement; regulators gain a documented, reviewable basis for the data behind a submission. Founded in 2026 by Nahid Alem Kermani, Aniterra has been demonstrated on representative Australian compliance scenarios, with its research accepted for publication at AIAC22.
Terrabit
Terrabit is a Brisbane-based geospatial company established in August 2025 making high-resolution Earth observation simple, dependable and accessible. Its innovation, Albatross, is an enterprise platform that brings the whole satellite workflow into one place: tasking and archive ordering across 60+ satellites from multiple vendors, analysis-ready processing performed in Australia, a spatio-temporal data catalogue and analytics. Teams that once waited weeks for data can now collaboratively order, track and view satellite imagery and elevation models. Trusted by major miners, energy companies, universities and Traditional Owner organisations, Albatross is building sovereign, end-to-end Earth observation capability for Australia.
Auspatious
Auspatious is an Australian cloud-native geospatial company building open, scalable Earth observation platforms. With the University of New South Wales' School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and in support of the Global Ocean Accounts Partnership, Auspatious developed the Spatial Data Framework (SDF), a public, open-source platform that combines multidecadal Earth observation data with administrative data to produce traceable environmental metrics, indicators and reports.
The SDF analyses any dataset against any boundary, at global scale across many timepoints. For example, it measures Global Mangrove Watch mangrove extent within every Exclusive Economic Zone annually. Every value in the SDF carries end-to-end provenance: a user can click it and trace it back to the source data, method, parameters and exact code version that produced it.
The result is Earth observation evidence that decision-makers can audit, reproduce and trust to act on.
Innovation in Earth Observation with Cross Organisational Collaboration
This award highlights innovation and collaboration across organisations and institutions to develop capabilities that benefit the wider community. Awarded for an EO project, program, product, or activity that has successfully involved collaborations or partnerships between organisations and/or personnel from different sectors that may include government, not for profit, business, education, research, and non-government. Collaborations that expand the reach, uptake, or application of Earth observation by creating new opportunities, partnerships, markets, or user communities will be highly regarded. The collaboration may include Australian and international partners.
Landgate
The WA Vegetation Extent (WAVE) Pilot demonstrates how cross-government collaboration can advance the use of earth observation to address complex vegetation mapping challenges across Western Australia.
For this Pilot, The Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER), in partnership with Landgate, combined earth observation, artificial intelligence and spatial science to investigate more consistent, repeatable and scalable vegetation mapping and monitoring. The Pilot addresses a significant environmental information gap exploring how government expertise and technology can improve understanding of vegetation extent statewide.
A standout achievement was Landgate's development of a deep-learning approach to identifying sparse native vegetation in the Pilbara region, where conventional remote sensing methods face considerable challenges.
Through shared ecological and technical expertise, the partnership demonstrated innovative mapping approaches, established reusable datasets, developed validation tools and processing workflows.
WAVE demonstrates the value of combining government capabilities to develop practical solutions to complex environmental challenges.
Geoimage
For 38 years, Geoimage has served the Australian and global Earth observation communities, committed to delivering satellite data and services to the highest standard of quality. Along the way it has also performed a significant industry/government education function on what EO is and what it is capable of. It has also trained and developed EO professionals who have moved to industry and government leading roles. Geoimage developed its own processing methodologies to provide the clearest possible lens on Earth observation capability, and has consistently been first to introduce new technologies into the Australian market while educating public and private sector users on their application.
Auspatious
This collaboration involves two partnerships. The first between Auspatious and Conservation International is part of a Global Environment Facility-funded initiative to support the delivery of high-resolution datasets for small island developing states supporting UN reporting on SDG 15.3. Auspatious is delivering high resolution land use/land cover (LULC) data, while other organisations, including Kartoza and Apacheta are delivering further datasets and capacity development workshops. The second partnership, an in-kind collaborative effort between Auspatious and Pacific Community (SPC), will expand the LULC dataset to all Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICTs).
Auspatious is an Australian cloud-native geospatial consultancy that delivers open, scalable Earth observation platforms and data products.
Conservation International is a global, non-profit that works with governments, communities and businesses to protect nature and the benefits it provides to people.
SPC is the Pacific’s principal scientific and technical organisation, owned by its 27 members. It supports PICTs development priorities, including through Digital Earth Pacific.
ENVestigator
Mining operations that manage groundwater must monitor their impact on surrounding vegetation, yet this relies largely on field surveys that are costly, slow and limited in scale, with operators and regulators often using different methods. ENVestigator offers a new approach, applying Earth observation, ecological modelling, and change detection to deliver consistent, defensible evidence across large, remote landscapes. Led by FrontierSI in collaboration with BHP, Rio Tinto, Fortescue and Mineral Resources, Western Australian environmental regulators and Curtin University, the initiative co-designed a shared satellite monitoring toolkit for the Pilbara. Using Sentinel and Landsat imagery via Digital Earth Australia, it maps groundwater dependent vegetation, detects change in near real time and rebuilds historical baselines for legacy sites. Now used by industry and government, and expanding to sub-regional scales through ENVestigator Next Generation, the collaboration has created a common evidence base that builds trust and supports better-informed environmental management across the sector.
AusEnHealth
How do the places Australians live, and the environmental conditions they face, shape their health? AusEnHealth is building national infrastructure to answer that question. Funded by the Medical Research Future Fund and led by Queensland University of Technology, the collaboration brings together Curtin University, University of Queensland, University of Canberra, University of Sydney, FrontierSI, NGIS, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, AURIN and the Burnet Institute. Partners are integrating Earth observation (EO) and climate products, including BARRA-2, CARDAT, CAMS, Digital Earth Australia and Landsat-derived land surface temperature, with demographic and human health data. Rather than creating new EO products, AusEnHealth is developing nationally consistent environmental health indicators and research capabilities, delivered through free tools including Local Area Risk Profiles and an Environmental Hazard Tracker. Running from June 2025 to June 2027, the project is laying foundations for a new national EO user community focused on environment and human health.
AusTemp
AusTemp is a collaborative national initiative that combines expertise in Earth observation, oceanography, ecology, and data infrastructure to deliver operational monitoring of marine temperature extremes across Australian waters. Led by the Bureau of Meteorology and supported by IMOS, AODN, AIMS, research institutions, and management agencies, the partnership deliver Australia's most comprehensive operational monitoring of marine temperature extremes. By transforming satellite observations into accessible information products, the team provides near real-time insights into marine heatwaves, marine cold spells, and thermal stress across Australian waters. These products support decision-making by reef managers, fisheries agencies, researchers, policymakers, and industry, while also enabling climate and ecosystem research. The initiative demonstrates the power of earth observation, cross-sector collaboration, integrating national observing systems, data infrastructure, and scientific expertise into an enduring operational capability that helps Australia monitor, understand, and respond to the impacts of a changing ocean.