Remote Sensing Monitoring of Urban Industrial Hotspots

Dear Colleagues,

In many developing countries, industrialisation is considered the best way to achieve economic progress. The industrial sector creates employment opportunities, on the one hand, and creates, on the other hand, a source of water/air pollution, odour, dust, and noise.

Because of ongoing global urbanisation, it is estimated that around 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities by 2050. This makes acquiring information about urban sites and monitoring changes in the extent of urbanisation crucial to meet the need for sustainable development in cities and human settlements promoted by the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The presence of heavy industry sites, such as coal power plants, steel manufacturers, and gas flaring sites, which, in urban contexts, form a so-called urban heat island, represent large local sources of greenhouse gases.

In seeking to support designers, planners, and decision makers in developing and implementing adaptation strategies and measures to make cities sustainable and resilient, reliable projections and modelling are required. However, existing data sets of heavy industry locations are either not public or suffer from gaps in reporting.

The urban context is highly complex, implying observations and measurements at various spatial and temporal scales to catch site characteristics and their changes over time. The recent proliferation of multiple remote sensing sensors and algorithms may provide valuable opportunities to examine and understand contemporary urbanisation and its associated socioeconomic and environmental changes.

This Special Issue aims to collect studies and research exploring the use of remote sensing technologies to detect industrial hot sources, map their spatial extent, particularly in urban areas, and assess their potential impact on the environment and human health.  Papers or review studies focusing on multisource data integration (e.g., multispectral, hyperspectral, and thermal) or multiscale approaches, also highlighting the advancement of big data analytical technologies and cloud platform processing systems and explore the current applications of remotely sensed data for monitoring urban industrial hotspots are welcome.

Articles may address, but are not limited, to the following topics:

• Urbanisation;
• Industrial hotspot detection;
• Urban heat islands identification;
• Remote sensing data;
• Satellite technologies;
• Spatiotemporal dynamics of hotspot features;
• Cloud platform processing systems;
• Big data;
• Environmental/social impacts;
• Climate change.

Dr. Mariapia Faruolo
Dr. Nicola Genzano
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• remote sensing
• urban studies
• industrial hotspots
• satellite products
• spatiotemporal data strategies
• environmental/social impacts of industrialisation