Proceedings of the 2021 conference on Big Data from Space : 18-20 May 2021

The BiDS conference series is co-organised by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, and the European Union Satellite Centre (SatCen). BiDS'21 emphasises not only on the insights that can be retrieved from Big Data from Space but also on the exploitation of these insights for foresight to improve our capacity to detect trends and model future evolution. This capacity is becoming increasingly important given the pace at which our World is changing. This is exemplified and reflected by the EU Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative and the related digital twin of the Earth. The objective of DestinE is to develop a very high precision digital model of the Earth to monitor and simulate natural and human activity, and to develop and test scenarios that would enable more sustainable development and support European environmental policies. The provision of more reliable scenarios of future evolution under different boundary conditions requires us to improve our understanding of Earth's dynamic systems besides their monitoring. Similarly to past editions of this conference, the 2021 edition provides a snapshot of the different research and innovation developments in the field of Big Data from Space including technical aspects and applications. These proceedings contain the papers presented at the on-line BiDS'21 conference held on May 18-20 as an on-line conference.