In a recent article by Roberta Kwok in the NATURE toolbox section some of the work at our department was mentioned. The articled focused on “Ecology’s remote-sensing revolution – satellite data, and the tools that ecologists use to analyse them, are more accessible and plentiful than ever.” Especially our activities regarding R package developments such as the widely used RStoolbox remote sensing R package and the currently developed getSpatialData R package to retrieve a variety of remote sensing data from the command line was discussed. Moreover, many great research projects by colleagues around the world were introduced as well as general developments in the spatial domain such as data access or software training and maturity (QGIS).