Jan Komarek
Data uncertainty
Combining outdoor passion with academic curiosity to build and support a growing community in drone-based environmental remote sensing.
About
Behind the initiative
Drones and satellites are transforming how we observe our environment. They offer perspectives that help us understand landscapes, ecosystems, and the changes unfolding across them. Yet to realise their full potential, what matters just as much as technology is the way we share knowledge and work together.
OpenSkyLab is a platform and community for open drone data and environmental remote sensing, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and students to share ideas, datasets, and methods across disciplines and borders. Our aim is to turn fragmented efforts into an open network that fosters reproducible science, practical applications, and long-term monitoring of our planet.
A key part of this effort is metadata. Every dataset becomes transparent and reusable only if we know how it was collected and processed. We emphasise systematic records of flight parameters, sensor calibration, environmental conditions, and processing provenance. These auxiliary files, aligned with international geospatial standards, allow datasets to be integrated across projects, compared over time, and validated against field data so that information derived from drones can be confidently reused.
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Remote sensing has been one of the most remarkable human endeavours that has supported scientific activities for years. Over the years, environmental remote sensing has undergone significant standardisation in data formats, processing protocols, and metadata structures, ensuring consistency and interoperability across scientific applications. Described metadata allows researchers to understand and process remote sensing data efficiently, enhancing reproducibility and reliability. As the standards and metadata guarantee a certain level of data reliability, drones still fall short, indicating the need for further data calibration, metadata and standards development.
Drones have emerged as a game-changing technology due to their flexibility, high-resolution capabilities, and lower operational costs. Drones are affordable and deployable anytime and anywhere. Drones can be mounted with any sensors that can be quickly swapped in the field. That’s what we read often, even in many scientific studies. However, such proclamations are a kind of illusion. The reachable spatial resolution of drone-borne data is indeed phenomenal. The pixel size of a few millimetres is not seen each day and can hardly be downloaded as open data from the database. But how much does such a resolution cost? We need to consider the affordability level critically. Until AI-driven real-time operations and analysis are commonly applied, we need to pay the operators in the field and the operators for data processing. We must compensate for depreciation, cover maintenance, build capacities, develop facilities, learn and tune best practices. That’s not cheap at all, and it's all about a compromise.
Whether you are a scientist, stakeholder, or simply curious about the future of remote sensing, OpenSkyLab invites you to explore, contribute, and join a growing community working together for open, transparent, and impactful environmental observation.
