Remote Sensing, Volume 12, Issue 1

This special issue gathers fourteen papers focused on the application of a variety of target object detection and identification techniques for remotely-sensed data. These data are acquired by different types of sensors (both passive and active) and...

Great Barrier Reef catchments are under pressure from the effects of climate change, landscape modifications, and hydrology alterations. With the use of remote sensing datasets covering large areas, conventional methods of change detection can expose...

Water use efficiency (WUE) measures the tradeoff between carbon uptake and water consumption in terrestrial ecosystems. It remains unclear how the responses of WUE to drought vary with drought severity. We assessed the spatio-temporal variations of e...

In savannas, mapping grazing resources and indicators of land degradation is important for assessing ecosystem conditions and informing grazing and land management decisions. We investigated the effects of classifiers and used time series imagery&mda...

Remote sensing of vegetation has largely been revolving around the measurement of passive or active electromagnetic radiation of the top of the canopy. Nevertheless, plants hold a vertical structure and different processes and intensities take place...

Climate warming has led to an urgent need for improved estimates of carbon accumulation in uneven-aged, mixed temperate forests, where high uncertainty remains. We investigated the feasibility of using LiDAR-derived forest attributes to initialize a...

Satellite imagery of 25–30 m spatial resolution has been recognized as an effective tool for monitoring the spatial and temporal dynamics of forest cover at different scales. However, the precise mapping of forest cover over fragmented landscap...

3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been demonstrated to be a powerful tool in hyperspectral images (HSIs) classification. However, using the conventional 3D CNNs to extract the spectral–spatial feature for HSIs results in too many par...

This study investigated the relationship between backscattering coefficients of a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and the four biophysical parameters of rice crops—plant height, green vegetation cover, leaf area index, and total dry biomass. A p...

Vegetation green-up date (GUD), an important phenological characteristic, is usually estimated from time-series of satellite-based normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data at regional and global scales. However, GUD estimates in seasonally...

The accuracy of the timing group delay (TGD) transmitted in the broadcast ephemeris is an important factor that affects the service performance of a GNSS system. In this contribution, an apparent bias is found by comparing the orbit and clock differe...

The existence of clouds is one of the main factors that contributes to missing information in optical remote sensing images, restricting their further applications for Earth observation, so how to reconstruct the missing information caused by clouds...

Using thermal infrared (TIR) data from multiple instruments and platforms for analysis of an entire active volcanic system is becoming more common with the increasing availability of new data. However, the accuracy and uncertainty associated with the...

A well-designed rain gauge network can provide precise and detailed rainfall data for earth science research; meanwhile, satellite precipitation data has been developed to generate more real spatial features, which provides new data support for the i...

This paper presents methods of monitoring river basin development and water variability for the transboundary river in North and South Korea. River basin development, such as dams and water infrastructure in transboundary rivers, can be a potential f...

The ECO System Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) is a new space mission developed by NASA-JPL which launched on July 2018. It includes a multispectral thermal infrared radiometer that measures the radiances in five...

Spectra of reflectance (S_r) and fluorescence (S_f) are significant for crop monitoring and ecological environment research, and can be used to indicate the leaf nitrogen content (LNC) of crops indirectly. The aim of this work is to use the S_r-S_f featu...

The forest stock volume (FSV) is one of the key indicators in forestry resource assessments on local, regional, and national scales. To date, scaling up in situ plot-scale measurements across landscapes is still a great challenge in the estimation of...

Surface downward shortwave radiation (DSR) and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), its visible component, are key parameters needed for many land process models and terrestrial applications. Most existing DSR and PAR products were developed fo...

This study examines whether the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) nighttime lights can be used to predict population migration in small areas in European Union (EU) countries. The analysis uses the most current data measured at the sm...

Huanglongbing (HLB) and Phytophthora foot and root rot are diseases that affect citrus production and profitability. The symptoms and physiological changes associated with these diseases are diagnosed through expensive and time-consuming field measur...

Seasonality is a fundamental feature of environmental systems which critically depend on the climate annual cycle. The regularity of the precipitation regime, in particular, is a basic factor to sustain equilibrium conditions. An incomplete or biased...

The measurements of gas concentrations in the atmosphere are recently developed thanks to the availability of gases absorbing spectral channels in space sensors and strictly depending on the instrument performances. In particular, measuring the sourc...

Kernels found in stone pinecones are of great economic value, often surpassing timber income for most forest owners. Visually evaluating cone production on standing trees is challenging since the cones are located in the sun-exposed part of the crown...

Land cover (LC) information plays an important role in different geoscience applications such as land resources and ecological environment monitoring. Enhancing the automation degree of LC classification and updating at a fine scale by remote sensing...

Remote sensing images are featured by massiveness, diversity and complexity. These features put forward higher requirements for the speed and accuracy of remote sensing image retrieval. The extraction method plays a key role in retrieving remote sens...

Narrow field-of-view scanning thermistor bolometer radiometers have traditionally been used to monitor the earth’s radiant energy budget from low earth orbit (LEO). Such instruments use a combination of cross-path scanning and along-path spacec...

Most available studies in lithological mapping using spaceborne multispectral and hyperspectral remote sensing images employ different classification and spectral matching algorithms for performing this task; however, our experiment reveals that no s...

It is difficult to extract a digital elevation model (DEM) from an airborne laser scanning (ALS) point cloud in a forest area because of the irregular and uneven distribution of ground and vegetation points. Machine learning, especially deep learning...

While mountain runoff provides great potential for the development and life quality of downstream populations, it also frequently causes seasonal disasters. The accurate modeling of hydrological processes in mountainous areas, as well as the amount o...

For the estimation of weak echo with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), a multilag estimator is developed, which has better performance than the conventional method. The performance of the multilag estimator is examined by theoretical analysis, simulat...

Downward shortwave radiation (R_S) drives many processes related to atmosphere–surface interactions and has great influence on the earth’s climate system. However, ground-measured R_S is still insufficient to represent the land surface, so...

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing and deep learning provide a practical approach to object detection. However, most of the current approaches for processing UAV remote-sensing data cannot carry out object detection in real time for emergen...

Surface soil moisture (SSM), the average water content of surface soil (up to 5 cm depth), plays a key role in the energy exchange within the ecosystem. We estimated SSM in areas with vegetation cover (grassland) by combining microwave and optical sa...

Knowledge of the flow patterns within distributary systems is key for understanding deltaic hydro- and morpho-dynamics, yet synoptic measurements of flow fields remain virtually nonexistent. As a means of overcoming this problem, a small number of st...

Tropical forests are known for hosting about half of the global biodiversity, and therefore are considered to be a fundamental part of the Earth System. However, in the last decades, the anthropogenic pressure over these areas has been continuously i...

Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI) observations are applied to marine fog (MF) detection in combination with Himawari-8 data based on the decision tree (DT) approach. Training and validation of the DT algorithm were conducted using match-ups bet...

Leaf area index (LAI) is an important parameter for monitoring the physical and biological processes of vegetation canopy. Due to the constraints of cloud contamination, snowfall, and instrument conditions, most of the current satellite remote sensin...

Ship detection in panchromatic optical remote sensing images is faced with two major challenges, locating candidate regions from complex backgrounds quickly and describing ships effectively to reduce false alarms. Here, a practical method was propose...

Snowoff (SO) date—defined as the last day of observed seasonal snow cover—is an important governor of ecologic and hydrologic processes across Alaska and Arctic-Boreal landscapes; however, our understanding and capacity for the monitoring...

Majuro Atoll in the central Pacific has high coastal vulnerability due to low-lying islands, rising sea level, high wave events, eroding shorelines, a dense population center, and limited freshwater resources. Land elevation is the primary geophysica...

Fires are frequent in boreal forests affecting forest areas. The detection of forest disturbances and the monitoring of forest restoration are critical for forest management. Vegetation phenology information in remote sensing images may interfere wit...

Accurate acquisition of the spatiotemporal distribution of urban forests and fragmentation (e.g., interior and intact regions) is of great significance to contributing to the mitigation of climate change and the conservation of habitat biodiversity....

Owing to the significant societal value of inland water resources, there is a need for cost-effective monitoring of water quality on large scales. We tested the suitability of the recently launched Sentinel-2A to monitor a key water quality parameter...

Timely and accurate crop type mapping is a critical prerequisite for the estimation of water availability and environmental carrying capacity. This research proposed a method to integrate time series Sentinel-1 (S1) and Sentinel-2 (S2) data for crop...

Because there are many unlabeled samples in hyperspectral images and the cost of manual labeling is high, this paper adopts semi-supervised learning method to make full use of many unlabeled samples. In addition, those hyperspectral images contain mu...

The north of Australia is known for its complex tidal system, where the highest astronomical tides (HATs) reach 12 m. This paper investigates the tidal behaviour in this region by developing spectral climatology for tide gauge and altimetry data. Pow...

Sorted stone circles are natural surface patterns formed in periglacial environments. Their relation to permafrost conditions make them very helpful for better understanding the past climates where they were formed and have evolved and also for monit...

Accurate crop planting area information is of significance for understanding regional food security and agricultural development planning. While increasing numbers of medium resolution satellite imagery and improved classification algorithms have bee...

Water transparency represented by the Secchi disk depth (Z_sd) plays an important role in understanding water ecology environment variations, especially for optically complex and shallow lake waters. In this study, using in situ measured remote sensin...