OpenEOcubes: an open-source and lightweight R-based RESTful web service for analyzing earth observation data cubes

In recent decades, Earth Observation (EO) systems have seen remarkable technological advancements, leading to a surge in

Earth-orbiting satellites capturing EO data. Cloud-based storage solutions have been adopted to manage the increasing data

volume. Although numerous EO data management and analysis platforms have emerged to accommodate this growth, many

suffer from limitations like closed-source software, leading to platform lock-in and restricted functionalities, restricting the

scientific community from conducting open and reproducible research. To tackle these issues, we present OpenEOcubes, a

lightweightEOdata cubes analysis service that embraces open-source tools, standardized APIs, and containerized deployment,

we demonstrate the service’s capabilities in two user scenarios: performing vegetation analysis in Amazonia, Brazil for one

year, and detecting changes in a forested area in Brandenburg, Germany based on five years of EO data.OpenEOcubes is an

easy-to-deploy service that empowers the scientific community to reproduce small and medium-sized EO scientific analysis

while aggregating over a potentially huge amount of data. It enables the extension of functionalities and validation of analysis

carried out on different EO data processing platforms.