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The concept of Essential Variables (EVs) has emerged within the remote sensing community in recent years. The EVs, having previously defined as a minimal set of variables that determines the system’s state and development, have attracted considerable interest not only for remote sensing scientists, but from several, diverse thematic groups and communities. The driving forces behind this evolution, relates primary to the need to support national to global monitoring, reporting, research, and forecasting of complex earth systems, to the necessity for an essential set of parameters that could be used for monitoring progress towards the goals of different thematic communities as well as to the requirement to support consistent, objective temporal information provision for policy development and implementation. Also, considering the availability of sensor data with similar characteristics from different satellites orbiting around earth, there is a need to standardize the information extracted, independently of the observational platform and the processing algorithms as well as to provide this information in a more streamlined, comprehensible form to end-users not well acquainted with the remote sensing technology and terminology. So far, EVs have been introduced and adopted for monitoring oceans, climate and biodiversity systems as well as measuring progress towards UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) implementation, while several other communities are in the process of adopting this concept in their domain. This study will review the recent progress as well as the current challenges and future developments in the research agenda around EVs. In particular we review the current state of EVs and their connection to the different scientific communities, as well as cross-domain interactions and synergies. We then describe potential new thematic areas and scientific communities where the concept of EVs could be applied and provide the outline of the process to be followed for identifying these variables.
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