Remote Sensing, Volume 7, Issue 8

Baseline information about dryland forest phenology is necessary to accurately anticipate future ecosystem shifts. The overarching goal of our study was to investigate the variability of vegetation phenology across a dryland forest landscape in respo...

With the development of quantitative remote sensing, regional evapotranspiration (ET) modeling based on the feature space has made substantial progress. Among those feature space based evapotranspiration models, accurate determination of the dry/wet...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission was initiated in 2009 with the goal of acquiring global soil moisture data over land using multi-angular L-band radiometric measurements. Specifically, surface soil moisture was estimated using the...

We obtained accurate, detailed motion distribution of glaciers in Central Asia by applying digital elevation model (DEM) assisted pixel-tracking method to L-band synthetic aperture radar imagery. The paper firstly introduces and analyzes each compone...

In this study, the Standardized Precipitation Evaporation Index (SPEI) was applied to characterize the drought conditions in Southwest China from 1982–2012. The SPEI was calculated by precipitation and temperature data for various accumulation period...

Wetlands are highly productive and support a wide variety of ecosystem goods and services. Various forms of global change impose compelling needs for timely and reliable information on the status of wetlands worldwide, but several characteristics of...

Land surface albedo data with high spatio-temporal resolution are increasingly important for scientific studies addressing spatially and/or temporally small-scale phenomena, such as urban heat islands and urban land surface energy balance. Our previo...

Vegetation phenology is a key biological indicator for monitoring terrestrial ecosystems and global change, and regions with the most obvious phenological changes in vegetation are primarily located at high latitudes and altitudes. Over the past thre...

Automatic extraction of ground points, called filtering, is an essential step in producing Digital Terrain Models from airborne LiDAR data. Scene complexity and computational performance are two major problems that should be addressed in filtering, e...

The Earth’s surface net radiation controls the energy and water exchanges between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere, and can be derived from satellite observations. The ability to monitor the net surface radiation over large areas at high spatia...

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), a high-precision technique used for acquiring three-dimensional (3D) surface information, is widely used to study surface vegetation information. Moreover, the extraction of a vegetation point set from the LiDAR p...

The persistent scatterers interferometry (PSI) technique is gradually becoming known for its capability of providing up to millimeter accuracy of measurement on ground displacement. Nevertheless, there is still quite a good amount of doubt regarding...

This paper presents a new assessment method for alleviating urban heat island (UHI) effects by using an urban land surface moisture (ULSM) index. With the aid of Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS data, the land surface temperature (LST) was retrieved by a mono-w...

The wide field of view (WFV) is an optical imaging sensor on-board the Gao Fen 1 (GF-1). The WFV lacks an on-board calibrator, so on-orbit radiometric calibration is required. Zhong et al. proposed a method for cross-calibrating the charge-coupled de...

As part of the EnMAP preparation activities this study aims at estimating the uncertainty in the EnMAP L2A ground reflectance product using the simulated scene of Barrax, Spain. This dataset is generated using the EnMAP End-to-End Simulation tool, pr...

This study proposes a method to recognize façades from large-scale urban scenes based on multi-level image features utilizing a recently developed oblique aerial photogrammetry technique. The method involves the use of multi-level image features, a b...

This paper presents a rigorous validation of five widely used global land cover products, i.e., GLCC (Global Land Cover Characterization), UMd (University of Maryland land cover product), GLC2000 (Global Land Cover 2000 project data), MODIS LC (Moder...

Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) is a state of the art technology to assess forest aboveground biomass (AGB). To date, methods developed to relate Lidar metrics with forest parameters were built upon the vertical component of the data. In multi-la...

The full-spectrum Solar-Induced chlorophyll Fluorescence (SIF) within the 650-800 nm spectral region can provide important information regarding physiological and biochemical activities in vegetation. This paper proposes a new Full-spectrum Spectral...

Rice farming in Northeast China is crucially important for China’s food security and sustainable development. A key challenge is how to optimize nitrogen (N) management to ensure high yield production while improving N use efficiency and protecting t...

Monitoring natural ecosystems and ecosystem transitions is crucial for a better understanding of land change processes. By providing synoptic views in space and time, remote sensing data have proven to be valuable sources for such purposes. With the...

The Velodyne LiDAR series is one of the most popular spinning beam LiDAR systems currently available on the market. In this paper, the temporal stability of the range measurements of the Velodyne HDL-32E LiDAR system is first investigated as motivati...

Burn severity metrics and classification have yet to be tested for many eastern U.S. deciduous vegetation types, but, if suitable, would be valuable for documenting and monitoring landscape-scale restoration projects that employ prescribed fire treat...

As the fifth largest freshwater lake in China, Lake Chaohu has drawn increasing attention due to the decline in water quality and the occurrence of massive algal blooms. We applied an algae pixel-growing algorithm to MODIS Terra or Aqua data (2100 im...

In this study, an algorithm to retrieve the gravimetric vegetation water content (GVWC, %) of corn was developed. First, the method for obtaining the optical depth from L-band (1.4 GHz) bi-angular, dual-polarized brightness temperatures (TB) for sho...

Taking photographs with a commercially available digital camera is an efficient and objective method for determining the green fractional vegetation cover (FVC) for field validation of satellite products. However, classifying leaves under shadows in...

Due to their image-based nature, “contextual” approaches are very attractive to estimate evapotranspiration (ET) from remotely-sensed land surface temperature (LST) data. Their application is however limited to highly heterogeneous areas where the so...

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) series R, S, T, U (GOES-R) will collect remote sensing data at several orders of magnitude compared to legacy missions, 24 × 7, over its 20-year operational lifecycle. A suite of 34 Earth a...

With the ever-increasing number of satellites and the availability of data free of charge, the integration of multi-sensor images in coherent time series offers new opportunities for land cover and crop type classification. This article investigates...

Aquatic vegetation serves many important ecological and socioeconomic functions in lake ecosystems. The presence of floating algae poses difficulties for accurately estimating the distribution of aquatic vegetation in eutrophic lakes. We present an a...

The upcoming satellite mission EnMAP offers the opportunity to retrieve information on the seasonal development of vegetation parameters on a regional scale based on hyperspectral data. This study aims to investigate whether an analysis method for th...

Change detection based on satellite images acquired from an area at different dates is of widespread interest, according to the increasing number of flood-related disasters. The images help to generate products that support emergency response and flo...

Four natural lakes in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River—Dongting Lake, Poyang Lake, Chaohu Lake and Taihu Lake—play a key role in the climate, environment, and ecology of this area. Upstream of these lakes, the Three Gorges Dam Proje...

Multiple stable states are established in coastal tidal wetlands (marshes, mangroves, deltas, seagrasses) by ecological, hydrological, and geomorphological feedbacks. Catastrophic shifts between states can be induced by gradual environmental change o...

Spartina alterniflora is one of the most hazardous invasive plant species in China. Monitoring the changes in dominant plant species can help identify the invasion mechanisms of S. alterniflora, thereby providing scientific guidelines on managing or...

Due to an oversight by the authors there is a correction necessary in this publication [1]. We would like to change the word “phase” to “step” throughout the manuscript. We apologize for any inconvenience caused to readers.[...]

This study investigated the spatiotemporal variation of vegetation growth and the influence of climatic drivers from 1982 to 2011 across China using datasets from the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and climatic drivers. Long term trend...

The accuracy of different workflows using Structure-from-Motion and Multi-View-Stereo techniques (SfM-MVS) is tested. Twelve point clouds of the Corral del Veleta rock glacier, in Spain, were produced with two different software packages (123D Catch...

Urban areas are one of the most important components of human society. Their extents have been continuously growing during the last few decades. Accurate and timely measurements of the extents of urban areas can help in analyzing population densities...

The knowledge about impacts of changes in precipitation regimes on terrestrial ecosystems is fundamental to improve our understanding of global environment change, particularly in the context that heavy precipitation is expected to increase according...

In close-range photogrammetry, images are difficult to acquire and organize primarily because of the limited field of view (FOV) of digital cameras when long focal lenses are used to measure large targets. To overcome this problem, we apply a scannin...

Multispectral, as well as multi-temporal, satellite images, coupled with measurements, in situ, have been widely applied to the water quality monitoring of reservoirs. However, the spatial resolutions of the current multispectral satellite imageries...

The aim of this paper is to propose a methodology combing multi-temporal X-band SAR images (TerraSAR-X) with continuous ground thetaprobe measurements, for the retrieval of surface soil moisture and texture at a high spatial resolution. Our analysis...

In this study, a methodology for glacier elevation reconstruction from Digital Elevation Model (DEM) time series (tDEM) is described for modeling the evolution of glacier elevation and estimating related volume change, with focus on medium-resolution...

Since the late 1970s, the Chinese government has initiated ecological restoration programs in the Three North Shelter Forest System Project (TNSFSP) area. Whether accelerated climate change will help or hinder these efforts is still poorly understood...

Accurate and timely maps of tree cover attributes are important tools for environmental research and natural resource management. We evaluate the utility of Landsat 8 for mapping tree canopy cover (TCC) and aboveground biomass (AGB) in a woodland la...

On-board the Landsat-8 satellite, the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), which has two adjacent thermal channels centered roughly at 10.9 and 12.0 μm, has a great benefit for the land surface temperature (LST) retrieval. The single-channel algorithm (S...

The current understanding of columnar aerosol optical and microphysical properties of different regions and seasons in China is insufficient due to the lack of measurements. Aiming to improve descriptions of aerosol models over China, this paper pres...

While the synergy between thermal, optical, and passive microwave observations is well known for the estimation of soil moisture and vegetation parameters, the use of remote sensing sources based on the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) rema...

This paper presents a rapid multi-return ALS-based (Airborne Laser Scanning) tree trunk detection approach. The multi-core Divide & Conquer algorithm uses a CBH (Crown Base Height) estimation and 3D-clustering approach to isolate points associate...