From 4 to 8 July 2016 GEO BON, the global initiative on biodiversity of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), organized its Open Science Conference in Leipzig, Germany. This edition of the conference focused on the targets and roadmap for "observing, monitoring, and managing biodiversity and related ecosystem services for 2020 and beyond". Products derived from PROBA-V will continue to be used to monitor biodiversity and help to assess the Essential Biodiversity Variables at global scale and thus contribute to GEO BON. Therefore, the city of Leipzig (in the right part of the image) is put into this week’s spotlight, amidst an amazing patchwork of agricultural fields (green) and lakes (dark blue – black), as captured in the daily synthesis false-colour of 1 January 2016. In the south-southeast, in red, two large coal mines stand out.