Remote Sensing, Volume 5, Issue 2

The use of spectral response curves for estimating nitrogen (N) leaf concentrations generally has been found to be a challenging task for a variety of plant species. In this investigation, leaf N concentration and corresponding laboratory hyperspectr...

Winter annual plants in southwestern North America influence fire regimes, provide forage, and help prevent erosion. Exotic annuals may also threaten native species. Monitoring winter annuals is difficult because of their ephemeral nature, making the...

Long-term global data sets of vegetation Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Fraction of Photosynthetically Active Radiation absorbed by vegetation (FPAR) are critical to monitoring global vegetation dynamics and for modeling exchanges of energy, mass and mome...

Many remote sensing applications are devoted to the agricultural sector. Representative case studies are presented in the special issue “Advances in Remote Sensing of Agriculture”. To complement the examples published within the special issue, a few...

The spatial distribution of crops and farming systems in Africa is determined by the duration of the period during which crop and livestock water requirements are met. The length of growing period (LGP) is normally assessed from weather station data—...

Remote Sensing has started to institute a “Best Paper” award to recognize the most outstanding papers in the area of remote sensing techniques, design and applications published in Remote Sensing. We are pleased to announce the first “Remote Sensin...

This paper presents a theoretical study of microwave remote sensing of vegetated surfaces. The purpose of this study is to find out if satellite bistatic radar systems can provide a performance, in terms of sensitivity to vegetation geophysical param...

Using estimated leaf unfolding data and two types of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI and NDVI3g) data generated from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) in the deciduous broadleaf forest of northern China during 1986 to...

In this paper, we estimate the trends and variability in Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR)-derived terrestrial net primary productivity (NPP) over India for the period 1982–2006. We find an increasing trend of 3.9% per decade (r = 0.78...

Understanding the impact of vegetation mixture and misclassification on leaf area index (LAI) estimation is crucial for algorithm development and the application community. Using the MODIS standard land cover and LAI products, global LAI climatologie...

Satellite remote sensing is a valuable tool for monitoring flooding. Microwave sensors are especially appropriate instruments, as they allow the differentiation of inundated from non-inundated areas, regardless of levels of solar illumination or freq...

The present article is an introductory paper in this special issue on synthetic aperture radar (SAR). A short review is presented on the recent trend and development of SAR and related techniques with selected topics, including the fields of applicat...

This practical resource provides a current and comprehensive treatment of GPS/GNSS antennas, taking into account modernized systems and new and developing applications. The book presents a number of key applications, describing corresponding receiver...

The frequency diverse multiple-input-multiple-output (FD-MIMO) radar synthesizes a wideband waveform by transmitting and receiving multiple frequency signals simultaneously. For FD-MIMO radar imaging, conventional imaging methods based on Matched Fil...

Assessment of forest degradation has been emphasized as an important issue for emission calculations, but remote sensing based detecting of forest degradation is still in an early phase of development. The use of optical imagery for degradation asses...

The ‘rain use efficiency’ (RUE) may be defined as the ratio of above-ground net primary productivity (ANPP) to annual precipitation, and it is claimed to be a conservative property of the vegetation cover in drylands, if the vegetation cover is not s...

Remote detection of non-native invasive plant species using geospatial imagery may significantly improve monitoring, planning and management practices by eliminating shortfalls, such as observer bias and accessibility involved in ground-based surveys...

Multitemporal optical remote sensing constitutes a useful, cost efficient method for crop status monitoring over large areas. Modelers interested in yield monitoring can rely on past and recent observations of crop reflectance to estimate aboveground...

Due to the abandonment of former agricultural management practices such as mowing and grazing, an increasing amount of grassland is no longer being managed. This has resulted in increasing shrub encroachment, which poses a threat to a number of speci...

As an important component of urban vegetation, street trees play an important role in maintenance of environmental quality, aesthetic beauty of urban landscape, and social service for inhabitants. Acquiring accurate and up-to-date inventory informati...

This paper presents a new method for constructing quickly and automatically precision tree models from point clouds of the trunk and branches obtained by terrestrial laser scanning. The input of the method is a point cloud of a single tree scanned fr...

We describe a prototype compact mobile laser scanning system that may be operated from a backpack or unmanned aerial vehicle. The system is small, self-contained, relatively inexpensive, and easy to deploy. A description of system components is prese...

In the Amazon, the development and paving of roads connects regions and peoples, and over time can form dense and recursive networks, which often serve as nodes for continued development. These developed areas exhibit robust fractal structures that c...

Mesoscale regional climate models (RCMs), the primary tool for climate predictions, have recently increased in sophistication and are being run at increasingly higher resolutions to be also used in climate impact studies on ecosystems, particularly i...