Many fields across Earth sciences have experienced a remarkable expansion of technological and methodological capabilities during the last decades. Increased computational power, new data collection techniques through cheaper and more reliable instruments, and the availability of high-quality data through the internet have boosted the possibilities. However, significant challenges arise from inadequate or imbalanced access to financial and human resources, hardware and software, and coherent and reproducible analysis approaches.

Throughout the last decade, free, transparent and user-driven software developments combined with open access to knowledge, and low-cost computation solutions introduced a game change to tackle these challenges. It is no longer funds that dominate creation and share of knowledge, but researchers who believe in maintaining principles of democratic participation in science.

In the field of Data Science, the free statistical software R has received increasing attention by the scientific community and is today an inevitable tool across many disciplines. LOCOS enable rapid implementation of new and innovative ideas. These new approaches do not free the researchers from taking care about the validity of their results. But if considered carefully, science can massively benefit from these methods and tools that often trade data quality for sampling density.

The goal of our interdisciplinary session is to provide a platform for i) R-based tools and methods and ii) innovative LOCOS to overcome pressing geoscientific challenges. We are delighted to offer you a stage to present and share experiences of how you handled your research questions using R and LOCOS. We also welcome more general contributions about how R and LOCOS helped you bridging different scientific fields: remote sensing data handling, spatial models, time series analysis and numeric modelling of ecologic, atmospheric/climatic, hydrologic, pedologic, geochronologic, topographic, geodynamic and further data. The session aims at fostering participative knowledge exchange and building a vital community whose activities revolve around the deliberate roles of R and LOCOS.