The Congo Basin—the world’s second-largest continuous tropical forest—is a biodiversity sanctuary and an important regulator of global biogeochemical cycles. Intensifying human pressure from land-use change and resource extraction threatens its integrity. Despite its significance, the region remains understudied due to logistical inaccessibility, historical instability, and limited research infrastructure. A new era of Earth Observation (EO) is transforming our capacity to monitor the Congo Basin. This session highlights innovative EO frameworks designed to characterize and monitor the region’s dynamics. We seek contributions that leverage the latest advancements in active and passive EO including NASA GEDI, Harmonized Landsat-Sentinel (HLS), NISAR, and ESA BIOMASS data. We encourage submissions exploring the integration of geospatial foundation models and machine learning embeddings to overcome traditional mapping challenges such as persistent cloud cover and structural complexity. This session aims to foster a comprehensive, data-driven understanding of the Congo Basin’s evolving role within the Earth system.

• B - Biogeosciences