Remote Sensing, Volume 7, Issue 6

The development of low-cost and relatively simple tools to identify emerging land degradation across complex regions is fundamental to plan monitoring and intervention strategies. We propose a procedure that integrates multi-spectral satellite observ...

Quantifying post-fire effects in a forested landscape is important to ascertain burn severity, ecosystem recovery and post-fire hazard assessments and mitigation planning. Reporting of such post-fire effects assumes significance in fire-prone countri...

Land subsidence is a worldwide problem that is typically caused by human activities, primarily the removal of groundwater. In Western Taiwan, groundwater has been pumped for industrial, residential, agricultural, and aquacultural uses for over 40 yea...

Impervious surfaces (IS) are a key indicator of environmental quality, and mapping of urban IS is important for a wide range of applications including hydrological modelling, water management, urban and environmental planning and urban climate studie...

Leaf biomass distribution is a key factor for modeling energy and carbon fluxes in forest canopies and for assessing fire behavior. We propose a new method to estimate 3D leaf bulk density distribution, based on a calibration of indices derived from...

Topography affects the fraction of direct and diffuse radiation received on a pixel and changes the sun–target–sensor geometry, resulting in variations in the observed radiance. Retrieval of surface–atmosphere properties from top of atmosphere radian...

The main objective of the present study was to apply a slope-based spectral method to both dry and fresh pasture vegetation. Differences in eight spectral ranges were identified across the near infrared-shortwave infrared (NIR-SWIR) that were indicat...

Solar surface radiation data of high quality is essential for the appropriate monitoring and analysis of the Earth's radiation budget and the climate system. Further, they are crucial for the efficient planning and operation of solar energy systems....

This Editorial introduces the papers published in the special issue “Earth Observation for Ecosystems Monitoring in Space and Time” which includes the most important researchers in the field and the most challenging aspects of the application of remo...

Soil management practices that maintain crop residue cover and reduce tillage improve soil structure, increase organic matter content in the soil, positively influence water infiltration, evaporation and soil temperature, and play an important role i...

The current study presents an algorithm to retrieve surface Soil Moisture (SM) from multi-temporal Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The developed algorithm is based on the Cumulative Density Function (CDF) transformation of multi-temporal RADARSA...

Satellite remote sensing offers an effective approach to estimate indicators of air quality on a large scale. It is critically significant for air quality monitoring in areas experiencing rapid urbanization and consequently severe air pollution, like...

The hydrodynamics of low-lying riverine floodplains and wetlands play a critical role in hydrology and ecosystem processes. Because small topographic features affect floodplain storage and flow velocity, a hydrodynamic model setup of these regions im...

Timely and accurate information on the global cropland extent is critical for applications in the fields of food security, agricultural monitoring, water management, land-use change modeling and Earth system modeling. On the one hand, it gives detail...

Habitat quality is the ability of the environment to provide conditions appropriate for individual and species persistence. Measuring or monitoring habitat quality requires complex integration of many properties of the ecosystem, where traditional te...

Validation of land cover products is a fundamental task prior to data applications. Current validation schemes and methods are, however, suited only for assessing classification accuracy and disregard the reliability of land cover products. The relia...

Due to technical limitations, it is impossible to have high resolution in both spatial and temporal dimensions for current NDVI datasets. Therefore, several methods are developed to produce high resolution (spatial and temporal) NDVI time-series data...

The objective of this study is to develop new algorithms for automated urban forest inventory at the individual tree level using LiDAR point cloud data. LiDAR data contain three-dimensional structure information that can be used to estimate tree heig...

Forest dynamics influence climate, biodiversity, and livelihoods at multiple scales, yet current resource policy addressing these dynamics is ineffective without reliable land use land cover change data. The collective impact of harvest decisions by...

Bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) archetypes extracted from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) BRDF/Albedo product over the global Earth Observing System Land Validation Core Sites can be used to simplify...

This paper describes a novel strategy for the visualization of hyperspectral imagery based on the analysis of image pixel pairwise distances. The goal of this approach is to generate a final color image with excellent interpretability and high contra...

In this study, an analysis of multi-temporal and multi-frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar data is performed to investigate the backscatter behavior of various semantic classes in the context of flood mapping in central Europe. The focus is mainly on...

In this paper, a novel current inversion algorithm from X-band marine radar images is proposed. The routine, for which deep water is assumed, begins with 3-D FFT of the radar image sequence, followed by the extraction of the dispersion shell from the...

Cloud fraction (CF) is known as the dominant modulator of Earth’s radiative fluxes. Ground-based CF observations are useful to characterize the cloudiness of a specific site and are valuable for comparison with satellite observations and numerical mo...

The robust detection of ships is one of the key techniques in coastal and marine applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Conventional SAR ship detectors involved multiple parameters, which need to be estimated or determined very carefully. In...

Management strategies and silvicultural treatments of fire-prone ecosystems often rely on knowledge of the regeneration potential and long-term recovery ability of vegetation types. Remote sensing and GIS applications are valuable tools providing cos...

Understanding the spatial and temporal dynamics of vegetation is essential in drylands. In this paper, we evaluated three vegetation indices, namely the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI) and the...

Wetlands are an important natural resource that requires monitoring. A key step in environmental monitoring is to map the locations and characteristics of the resource to better enable assessment of change over time. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sy...

The provenance of observations from a Sensor Web enabled remote sensing application represents a great challenge. There are currently no representations or tracking methods. We propose a provenance method that represents and tracks remote sensing obs...

Stable night-time light data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Line-scan System (OLS) provide a unique proxy for anthropogenic development. This paper presents a regional urban extent extraction method using a one-c...

Desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria) represent a major threat for agro-pastoral resources and food security over almost 30 million km2 from northern Africa to the Arabian peninsula and India. Given the differential food preferences of this insect p...

Changes in soil moisture between two radar acquisitions can impact the observed coherence in differential interferometry: both coherence magnitude |Υ| and phase Φ are affected. The influence on the latter potentially biases the estimation of deformat...

The estimation of the Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation in forests (forest fAPAR) from multi-spectral Landsat-8 data is investigated in this paper using a physically based radiative transfer model (Invertible Forest Reflectance...

Dual polarization is a typical operational mode of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR). However, few studies have considered the scattering mechanism extraction of dual-polarization SARs. A modified Cloude-Pottier decomposition is proposed to...

The scattering of GNSS signals over a water surface is studied when the receiver is at a low height, as in GNSS-R coastal altimetry. The precise determination of the local sea level and wave state from the coast will provide useful altimetry and wave...

Dongting Lake, the second largest freshwater lake in China, is well known for its rapid seasonal fluctuations in inundation extents in the middle reach of the Yangtze River, and it is also the lake most affected by the Three Gorges Project. Significa...

Especially in the remote sensing context, thematic classification is a desired product for coral reef surveys. This study presents a novel statistical-based image classification approach, namely Partial Least Square Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA), ca...

Significant economic losses, large affected populations, and serious environmental damage caused by recurrent natural disaster events (NDE) worldwide indicate insufficiency in emergency preparedness and response. The barrier of full life cycle data p...

This paper presents a technique to generate cirrus optical depth and particle effective size estimates from the cloud emissivities at 8.5, 11 and 12 μm contained in the Collection-6 (C6) MYD06 cloud product. This technique employs the latest scatteri...

As the largest natural source of methane, wetlands play an important role in the carbon cycle. High-resolution maps of wetland type and extent are required to quantify wetland responses to climate change. Mapping northern wetlands is particularly imp...

Managers of forested water supply catchments require efficient and accurate methods to quantify changes in forest water use due to changes in forest structure and density after disturbance. Using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data with as few...

The mapping and forecasting of droughts and floods is an important potential field of application of global soil moisture and water storage products from satellites and models. Especially when extremes in near-surface soil moisture propagate into ext...

Search-centric, sample supervised image segmentation has been demonstrated as a viable general approach applicable within the context of remote sensing image analysis. Such an approach casts the controlling parameters of image processing—generating s...

Greenhouse detection and mapping via remote sensing is a complex task, which has already been addressed in numerous studies. In this research, the innovative goal relies on the identification of greenhouse horticultural crops that were growing under...

In environments that are hostile to Global Navigation Satellites Systems (GNSS), the precision achieved by a mobile light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system (MLS) can deteriorate into the sub-meter or even the meter range due to errors in the posit...

Long-term snow depth/snow water equivalent (SWE) products derived from passive microwave remote sensing data are fundamental for climatological and hydrological studies. However, the temporal continuity of the products is affected by the updating or...

New calculations of the relative optical air mass function are made over the 0°–87° range of apparent solar zenith angle θ, for various vertical profiles of background aerosol, diamond dust and thin cirrus cloud particle extinction coefficient in th...

This paper examines the spatial error structures of eight precipitation estimates derived from four different satellite retrieval algorithms including TRMM Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA), Climate Prediction Center morphing technique (C...

Typically, digital image processing for burned-areas detection combines the use of a spectral index and the seasonal differencing method. However, the seasonal differencing has many errors when applied to a long-term time series. This article aims to...

With the high resolution of optical data and the lack of weather effects of passive microwave data, we developed an algorithm to map daily cloud-free fractional snow cover (FSC) based on the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) stand...