About the Guest Editors

**Benjamin Koetz** works as Application Scientist in the Earth Observation Directorate of the European Space Agency. His tasks focus on the development of Earth Observation (EO) applications in close collaboration with relevant user communities, scientists, and EO service providers. In particular, he is responsible for the TIGER initiative dealing with EO for water resource management in Africa and is involved as co-lead in the GEO-Global Agricultural Monitoring Initiative (GEOGLAM). Benjamin Koetz received his M.S. degree in Environmental Sciences with a major in Remote Sensing from the University of Trier, Germany. He also holds a Ph.D. with a specialization in Earth Observation from the University of Zürich, Switzerland. His scientific expertise focuses on the development of physically-based methodologies to derive geo-biophysical EO products.

**Zoltán Vekerdy** is a hydrologist and remote sensing specialist, who holds the position of Assistant Professor at the ITC Faculty of the University of Twente, Netherlands. He also works as Scientific Advisor at the Szent István University, Hungary. He started his research carrier in the 1980s at the Water Resources Research Centre (VITUKI) in Hungary. Since the beginning, his field of interest has been the application of Earth Observation for water management, with focus on environmental and agricultural aspects. He did research on a number of wetlands around the world, including, among others, in Iran, China, Mexico, and several countries of Africa. Throughout his carrier, he has been supervising several young researchers at PhD and MSc levels at universities of the US, Netherlands, Hungary, and Zambia. He (co-)authored more than hundred scientific publications, including peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and scientific reports. Since 2008, as the Principal Investigator of the TIGER Capacity Building Facility funded by the European Space Agency, he has been coordinating the network of several hundreds of researchers working on more than fifty Earth observation research projects in the water sector of Africa.

**Massimo Menenti** is professor of Optical and Laser Remote Sensing at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands and an internationally renowned scientist in the fields of Earth Observation and Global Terrestrial Water Cycle. His achievements have been attained in the retrieval of land surface properties from remote sensing, including the estimation of evapotranspiration (ET), time series analysis of remote sensing products, and the application of remote sensing technology in hydrology and climate models. He is one of the earliest researchers in using laser technology to measure surface aerodynamic roughness. He initiated the use of time series analysis techniques to extract information from satellite data. He developed the surface energy balance index (SEBI) theory for ET estimation, which is the prototype of the following S-SEBI, SEBS, and SEBAL models. He held senior research positions in the Netherlands, France, the USA, and Italy, and has coordinated many large European projects with participants from Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. He has recently been granted a National Distinguished Foreign Expert award by the People Republic of China.

**Diego Fernández-Prieto** received his B.S Degree in Physics from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 1994. In 1994 and 1996, he was with the "Istituto per la Matematica Applicata" (I.M.A) of the National Research Council (C.N.R), Genoa, Italy. In 1997, he received his Master Degree in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Deusto, Spain, and the University of Kent, United Kingdom. In 2001, he received his Ph.D degree in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science from the Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Genoa, Italy. Since 2001, he has been with the Earth Observation (EO) Science, Applications and Future Technologies Department of the European Space Agency (ESA). At present, he is program manager of the Support To Science Element (STSE), aimed at addressing the scientific needs and requirements of the Earth system science community in terms of novel mission concepts, new algorithms, and products and innovative Earth science results.
