2016 February - 83 articles
The Songnen Plain of the Northeast China is one of the three largest soda saline-alkali regions worldwide. To better understand soil alkalinization and salinization in this important agricultural region, it is vital to explore the distribution and va...
Land surface temperature (LST) is an important variable that provides a valuable connection between the energy and water budget and is strongly linked to land surface hydrology. Space-borne remote sensing provides a consistent means for regularly obs...
The S-NPP Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument, a polar orbiting Earth remote sensing instrument built using a strong MODIS background, employs a similarly designed on-board calibrating source—a V-grooved blackbody for the The...
A large-scale re-vegetation supported by the Grain for Green Project (GGP) has greatly changed local eco-hydrological systems, with an impact on soil moisture conditions for the Chinese Loess Plateau. It is important to know how, exactly, re-vegetati...
Understanding of evapotranspiration (ET) processes over Andean mountain environments is crucial, particularly due to the importance of these regions to deliver water-related ecosystem services. In this context, the detection of spatio-temporal change...
While satellite-based monitoring of vegetation activity at the earth’s surface is of vital importance for many eco-climatological applications, the degree of agreement among certain sensors and products providing estimates of the Normalized Differenc...
Mapping species through classification of imaging spectroscopy data is facilitating research to understand tree species distributions at increasingly greater spatial scales. Classification requires a dataset of field observations matched to the image...
High spatial resolution (HSR) image scene classification is aimed at bridging the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level semantic concepts, which is a challenging task due to the complex distribution of ground objects in HSR images. S...
The accurate extraction and mapping of built-up areas play an important role in many social, economic, and environmental studies. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for built-up area detection from high spatial resolution remote sensing image...
High-resolution urban land use maps have important applications in urban planning and management, but the availability of these maps is low in countries such as China. To address this issue, we have developed a protocol to identify urban land use fun...
Orbital thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing is an important tool for characterizing geologic surfaces on Earth and Mars. However, deposition of material from volcanic or eolian activity results in bedrock surfaces becoming significantly mantled ove...
Sentinel-2 (S2) earth observation satellite mission, launched in 2015, is foreseen to promote within-field decisions in Precision Agriculture (PA) for both: (1) optimizing crop production; and (2) regulating environmental impacts. In this second scop...
The Urban Heat Island (UHI) is one of the most well documented phenomena in urban climatology. Although a range of measurements and modelling techniques can be used to assess the UHI, the paucity of traditional meteorological observations in urban ar...
Stellera chamaejasme L. (S. chamaejasme) is one of the primary toxic grass species (poisonous plants) distributed in the alpine meadows of Qinghai Province, China. In this study, according to the distinctive phenological characteristics of S. chamaej...
The knowledge of the topographic features, the building properties, and the road infrastructure settings are relevant operational tasks for managing post-crisis events, restoration activities, and for supporting search and rescue operations. Within s...
Calibration and validation of satellite observations are essential and on-going tasks to ensure compliance with mission accuracy requirements. An automated above water hyperspectral radiometer significantly augmented Australia’s ability to contribute...
Monitoring front dynamics is essential for studying the ocean’s physical and biogeochemical processes. However, the diurnal displacement of fronts remains unclear because of limited in situ observations. Using the hourly satellite imageries from the...
Species distribution models are now widely used in conservation and management to predict suitable habitat for protected marine species. The primary sources of dynamic habitat data have been in situ and remotely sensed oceanic variables (both are con...
The invasive taxa of Prosopis is rated the world’s top 100 unwanted species, and a lack of spatial data about the invasion dynamics has made the current control and monitoring methods unsuccessful. This study thus tests the use of in situ spectroscop...
Modern satellite radiometers have many detectors with different relative spectral response (RSR). Effect of RSR differences on striping and the root cause of striping in sensor data record (SDR) radiance and brightness temperature products have not b...
Satellite images in mountainous areas are strongly affected by topography. Different studies demonstrated that the results of semi-empirical topographic correction algorithms improved when a stratification of land covers was carried out first. Howeve...
Regular monitoring of expanding impervious surfaces areas (ISAs) in urban areas is highly desirable. MODIS data can meet this demand in terms of frequent observations but are lacking in spatial detail, leading to the mixed land cover problem when per...
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instruments on-board both the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) and the first Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS-1) spacecraft, with launch dates of October 2011 and December 2016...
This paper investigates a simplified polarimetric decomposition for soil moisture retrieval over agricultural fields. In order to overcome the coherent superposition of the backscattering contributions from vegetation and underlying soils, a simplifi...
The mangroves of the Rufiji Delta are an important habitat and resource. The mangrove forest reserve is home to an indigenous population and has been under pressure from an influx of migrants from the landward side of the delta. Timely and effecti...
The panchromatic and multispectral (PMS) sensor is an optical imaging sensor aboard the Gao Fen-1 (GF-1) satellite. This work describes an approach to validate the calibration coefficients of the PMS sensors based on the image data of the Landsat 8 O...
Land surface albedo (LSA), one of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) environmental data records (EDRs), is a fundamental component for linking the land surface and the climate system by regulating shortwave energy exchange between...
Semi-natural grasslands with grazing management are characterized by high fine-scale species richness and have a high conservation value. The fact that fine-scale surveys of grassland plant communities are time-consuming may limit the spatial extent...
In this study, Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) was used to determine the seismogenic fault and slip distribution of the 3 July 2015 Pishan earthquake in the Tarim Basin, western China. We obtained a coseismic deformation map from the...
The Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) will launch its first JPSS-1 satellite in early 2017. The JPSS-1 and follow-on satellites will carry aboard an array of instruments including the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), the Cross-tra...
The Soumi NPP VIIRS Day/Night Band (DNB) nighttime imagery quality is affected by stray light contamination. In this study, we examined the relationship between the Earth scene stray light and the signals in VIIRS’s calibrators to better understand s...
Coral reefs are in decline worldwide and monitoring activities are important for assessing the impact of disturbance on reefs and tracking subsequent recovery or decline. Monitoring by field surveys provides accurate data but at highly localised scal...
The fast proliferation of new satellite, aerial and terrestrial remote sensing techniques has undoubtedly provided new technological and scientific opportunities to society during the last few decades. [...]
The radiometric calibration equations for the thermal emissive bands (TEB) and the reflective solar bands (RSB) measurements of the earth scenes by the polar satellite sensors, (Terra and Aqua) MODIS and Suomi NPP (VIIRS), and geostationary sensors,...
In recent years, satellite synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) has been adopted as a spaceborne geodetic tool to successfully measure surface deformation of a few well-known landslides in the Three Gorges area. In consideration of the fac...
The new generation of weather observatory satellites, namely Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) constellation satellites, is the lead observatory of the 10 highly advanced earth orbiting weather research satellites. Indeed, GPM is the first satel...
Shrubs have been reported to expand into grassland and polar regions in the world, which causes complex changes in ecosystem carbon, nutrients, and resilience. Given the projected global drying trend, shrubs with their superior drought resistance and...
Permanent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) has been used to detect and characterize the subsidence of the Pisa urban area, which extends for 33 km2 within the Arno coastal plain (Tuscany, Italy). Two SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) datasets, covering th...
Airborne laser scanning (ALS) allows for extensive coverage, but the accuracy of tree detection and form can be limited. Although terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can improve on ALS accuracy, it is rather expensive and area coverage is limited. Multi...
Uneven-aged forest management has received increasing attention in the past few years. Compared with even-aged plantations, the complex structure of uneven-aged forests complicates the formulation of management strategies. Forest structural diversity...
There is an increasing need to consistently combine observations from different sensors to monitor the state of the land surface. In order to achieve this, robust methods based on the inversion of radiative transfer (RT) models can be used to interpr...
Species richness generally promotes ecosystem productivity, although the shape of the relationship varies and remains the subject of debate. One reason for this uncertainty lies in the multitude of methodological approaches to sampling biodiversity a...
Algorithms for a rapid analysis of hyperspectral data are becoming more and more important with planned next generation spaceborne hyperspectral missions such as the Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP) and the Japanese Hyperspectral Im...
Remote sensing image clustering is a challenging task considering its intrinsic complexity. Recently, by combining the spectral and spatial information of the remote sensing data, the clustering performance can be dramatically enhanced, termed as Spe...
Eucalyptus, a short-rotation plantation, has been expanding rapidly in southeast China in recent years owing to its short growth cycle and high yield of wood. Effective identification of eucalyptus, therefore, is important for monitoring land use cha...
Knowledge of current vegetation dynamics and an ability to make accurate predictions of ecological changes are essential for minimizing food scarcity in developing countries. Vegetation trends are also closely related to sustainability issues, such a...
Remote Sensing of Sun-Induced Chlorophyll Fluorescence (SIF) is a research field of growing interest because it offers the potential to quantify actual photosynthesis and to monitor plant status. New satellite missions from the European Space Agency,...
The Special Issue (SI) on “Remote Sensing of Water Resources” presents a diverse range of papers studying remote sensing tools, methods, and models to better monitor water resources which include inland, coastal, and open ocean waters. The SI is comp...
This Special Issue gathers sixteen papers focusing on applying various remote sensing techniques to crop growth monitoring. The studies span observations from multiple scales, a combination of model simulations and experimental measurements, and a ra...
This paper introduces a novel top-down approach to geospatially identify and distinguish areas of mixed use from predominantly residential areas within urban agglomerations. Under the framework of the World Bank’s Central American Country Disaster Ri...
of 2
