11th International Symposium on Digital Earth Held in Florence, Italy

The 11th International Symposium on Digital Earth jointly with the 20th Anniversary of Digital Earth symposium series were held in Florence, Italy on September 24, 2019. The four-day event was hosted by the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) and was co-organized by the National Research Council of Italy together with the European Commission - Joint Research Centre.

With the theme of “Digital Earth in a Transformed Society”, the symposium attracted more than 400 representatives from more than 20 countries and related international organizations.

During the opening ceremony held in the Florence City Hall on September 24, Prof. GUO Huadong， ISDE President, delivered the opening remarks. The Manual of Digital Earth, which was contributed by more than 100 scholars from 18 countries in three years was pre-released on the ceremony.

In the plenary section, Prof. GUO Huadong, Dr. Alessandro Annoni, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton (from the International Science Council), and Prof. Graciela Metternicht (from the University of New South Wales, Australia) were invited to give keynote speeches on “Digital Earth Retrospective”, “Digital Earth Future Challenges”, “Global Sustainability: the Challenge for Science”, “The Future is Now: the Challenge of Digital Earth to be Relevant in Global Transitions to Sustainability”, respectively.

In the following two plenary sessions and 28 parallel sessions  on September 25-27, 151 scientists gave academic reports in the fields of Earth science, Earth observation, big data, remote sensing, and data mining related to Digital Earth, as well as the applications of Digital Earth in urban, marine, atmospheric, life sciences, heritage, public science and relevant fields.

On the closing ceremony of the symposium, the 12th International Symposium on Digital Earth was officially announced to be held in Salzburg, Austria in 2021, and the 2019 Florence Declaration on Digital Earth was adopted as a milestone document after the 1999 and 2009 Beijing Declaration on Digital Earth.