We invite users to explore DestinE Data lake services latest evolutions and discover the expanded capabilities now available.
In this fifth evolution of features and services, recent enhancements make the Destination Earth Data Lake more accessible for both new and existing users, while providing the reliability, automation and performance required by expert and operational users. These enhancements are aligned with the DestinE roadmap and respond to feedback from the DestinE community.
Harmonised Data Access (HDA)
HDA is the main service for discovering and accessing Destination Earth data portfolio in a unified manner.
What’s New
- Service Accounts (API keys) are now available in addition to user logins. This enables secure, traceable access for automated systems, operational pipelines and machine-to-machine use, while continuing to support interactive users
- Clearer data request validation removes default values and requires mandatory parameters to be explicitly provided. This reduces errors, increases transparency and helps users understand exactly what data they are requesting
- Climate Adaptation Digital Twin data have been reorganised into 12 focused collections, each aligned with a specific experiment or model configuration. This simplifies data discovery and reduces technical complexity
- Access to additional external data providers is now federated through HDA, expanding available datasets via a single interface. There are 44 new collections in this release, bringing the total to 241
- Catalogue entries now include links to Jupyter notebooks, allowing users to move directly from discovery to practical use
My Data Lake Services
Open to all users, My Data Lake Services is the central tool for managing access to Destination Earth Data Lake Edge Services. Projects are submitted for approval in the tool, and it allows approved projects and organisations to be managed, along with user access and permissions.
What’s New
- Users can work across multiple organisations (high-level projects) within one account
- Projects can manage resources among multiple European Data Bridge locations
- Easier switching between projects and optional visual customisation
- Support for API keys and site-specific S3 credentials, enabling both automated and interactive use
- Clearer governance of project membership and improved visibility of cloud resources
Destination Earth Data Lake Website
The Data Lake website now better supports discovery and onboarding.
What’s New
- A site-wide Interactive Assistant (chatbot) allows users to ask questions in natural language about data, services and usage
- Addition of Data Portfolio filters
- Introduction of a News section that will be populated with updates on data, services and features
STACK service
The STACK service provides hosted computing environments directly within the Data Lake, combining interactive Jupyter notebooks and scalable analytics.
What’s New
- GPU-enabled environments support faster analysis and machine-learning workloads
- Improved performance for working with large Earth observation and Digital Twin datasets
For examples on how to use the various services (HDA, STACK (JupyterHub/Dask), HOOK, ISLET Storage, ISLET Compute) refer to the GitHub examples repository .
What’s Next?
Work on the next batch of features for the Destination Earth Data Lake is currently underway, with the next release expected in Q2 2026.
In the coming months, Version 1 of the HDA API will be phased out. Version 2 was introduced in the previous release – the latest Version 2 endpoint URL to be used is https://hda.data.destination-earth.eu/stac/v2/ .
Please consider using the Version 2 HDA API from