Samoylov Island and its surrounding areas of the Lena River Delta serve as a baseline observatory for the validation and development of remote sensing products and climate models in the Arctic. The observatory is equipped with leading edge environmental monitoring systems. Furthermore, extensive validation studies on thermal remote sensing (MODIS LST), snow products (GlobSnow), land surface classification (Landsat), and microwave satellite products (ASCAT Soil Moisture, TerraSAR-X) were implemented successfully. Several ongoing and upcoming research projects which are related to permafrost modeling and remote sensing such as the EU-FP7 project PAGE21, the HGF young investigator group TEAM, and the ERC Starting Grant project PETA-CARB make use of the excellent data base and infrastructure of the Samoylov observatory. Further expansion of the infrastructure is fostered by the HGF Road Map project ACROSS which aims to establish state of the art monitoring stations for testing new satellite sensors, model schemes, and scaling techniques.