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Remote Sensing, Volume 9, Issue 10

2017 October - 115 articles

Cover Story: Africa has potential to provide solution to the global food-security challenges of the twenty-first century, given that it is the only continent where land and water are still plentiful for cropland expansion. Further, with the population expected to reach 4 billion by the end of this century—from the current 1.2 billion—there is urgent need for accurate, high-resolution cropland maps of Africa. This paper integrates novel approaches, involving pixel-based machine learning algorithms with object-based segmentation on the Google Earth Engine cloud, to derive the cropland extent product at 30 m resolution of Africa (2015) using about 36,924 Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 images. This 30-m Global Food Security-Support Analysis Data, cropland extent product of Africa is available for download (https://doi.org/10.5067/MEaSUREs/GFSAD/GFSAD30AFCE.001) and live view (https://croplands.org/app/map). View the paper
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Articles (115)

  • Article
  • Open Access
12 Citations
6,381 Views
19 Pages

Computing Coastal Ocean Surface Currents from MODIS and VIIRS Satellite Imagery

  • Jianfei Liu,
  • William J. Emery,
  • Xiongbin Wu,
  • Miao Li,
  • Chuan Li and
  • Lan Zhang

24 October 2017

We explore the potential of computing coastal ocean surface currents from Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite imagery using the maximum cross-correlation (MCC) method....

  • Article
  • Open Access
40 Citations
6,964 Views
23 Pages

A 33-Year NPP Monitoring Study in Southwest China by the Fusion of Multi-Source Remote Sensing and Station Data

  • Xiaobin Guan,
  • Huanfeng Shen,
  • Wenxia Gan,
  • Gang Yang,
  • Lunche Wang,
  • Xinghua Li and
  • Liangpei Zhang

24 October 2017

Knowledge of regional net primary productivity (NPP) is important for the systematic understanding of the global carbon cycle. In this study, multi-source data were employed to conduct a regional NPP study in southwest China, with a 33-year time span...

  • Article
  • Open Access
32 Citations
6,654 Views
21 Pages

24 October 2017

In recent years, airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) that provided three-dimensional forest information has been widely applied in forest inventory and has shown great potential in automatic individual tree crown delineation (ITCD). Usually,...

  • Letter
  • Open Access
10 Citations
5,773 Views
15 Pages

Multi-Layer Model Based on Multi-Scale and Multi-Feature Fusion for SAR Images

  • Aobo Zhai,
  • Xianbin Wen,
  • Haixia Xu,
  • Liming Yuan and
  • Qingxia Meng

24 October 2017

A multi-layer classification approach based on multi-scales and multi-features (ML–MFM) for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the SAR image is partitioned into superpixels, which are local, coherent regions tha...

  • Article
  • Open Access
53 Citations
7,943 Views
14 Pages

23 October 2017

Soil spectroscopy has shown to be a fast, cost-effective, environmentally friendly, non-destructive, reproducible and repeatable analytical technique. Soil components, as well as types of instruments, protocols, sampling methods, sample preparation,...

  • Article
  • Open Access
15 Citations
5,918 Views
24 Pages

23 October 2017

Accurate knowledge of the sea ice parameters, including the thickness and the snow depth over sea ice, are key to both climate change studies and operational forecast in polar regions. The estimation of these parameters mainly relies on satellite bas...

  • Article
  • Open Access
17 Citations
7,768 Views
22 Pages

Improving Jason-2 Sea Surface Heights within 10 km Offshore by Retracking Decontaminated Waveforms

  • Zhengkai Huang,
  • Haihong Wang,
  • Zhicai Luo,
  • C. K. Shum,
  • Kuo-Hsin Tseng and
  • Bo Zhong

23 October 2017

It is widely believed that altimetry-derived sea surface heights (SSHs) in coastal zones are seriously degraded due to land contamination in altimeter waveforms from non-marine surfaces or due to inhomogeneous sea state conditions. Spurious peaks sup...

  • Letter
  • Open Access
91 Citations
13,760 Views
13 Pages

Vis-NIR Spectroscopy and PLS Regression with Waveband Selection for Estimating the Total C and N of Paddy Soils in Madagascar

  • Kensuke Kawamura,
  • Yasuhiro Tsujimoto,
  • Michel Rabenarivo,
  • Hidetoshi Asai,
  • Andry Andriamananjara and
  • Tovohery Rakotoson

23 October 2017

Visible and near-infrared (Vis-NIR) diffuse reflectance spectroscopy with partial least squares (PLS) regression is a quick, cost-effective, and promising technology for predicting soil properties. The advantage of PLS regression is that all availabl...

  • Article
  • Open Access
60 Citations
10,660 Views
19 Pages

Impacts of Airborne Lidar Pulse Density on Estimating Biomass Stocks and Changes in a Selectively Logged Tropical Forest

  • Carlos Alberto Silva,
  • Andrew Thomas Hudak,
  • Lee Alexander Vierling,
  • Carine Klauberg,
  • Mariano Garcia,
  • António Ferraz,
  • Michael Keller,
  • Jan Eitel and
  • Sassan Saatchi

23 October 2017

Airborne lidar is a technology well-suited for mapping many forest attributes, including aboveground biomass (AGB) stocks and changes in selective logging in tropical forests. However, trade-offs still exist between lidar pulse density and accuracy o...

  • Article
  • Open Access
51 Citations
8,519 Views
20 Pages

23 October 2017

In this work, the bands of a Sentinel-2A image with spatial resolutions of 20 m and 60 m are sharpened to a spatial resolution of 10 m to obtain visible and near-infrared (VNIR) and shortwave infrared (SWIR) spectral bands with a spatial resolution o...

  • Technical Note
  • Open Access
15 Citations
8,405 Views
15 Pages

22 October 2017

Our research focuses on assessing the usability of the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP) classification scheme provided in the MODIS MCD12Q1-1 dataset for assessing the land cover of the city-state, Singapore. We conducted a user stu...

  • Article
  • Open Access
9 Citations
6,304 Views
13 Pages

Using Satellite Data for the Characterization of Local Animal Reservoir Populations of Hantaan Virus on the Weihe Plain, China

  • Pengbo Yu,
  • Yidan Li,
  • Bo Xu,
  • Jing Wei,
  • Shen Li,
  • Jianhua Dong,
  • Jianhui Qu,
  • Jing Xu,
  • Zheng Y.X. Huang and
  • Jingjun Wang
  • + 11 authors

22 October 2017

Striped field mice (Apodemus agrarius) are the main host for the Hantaan virus (HTNV), the cause of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) in central China. It has been shown that host population density is associated with pathogen dynamics and...

  • Article
  • Open Access
9 Citations
7,349 Views
15 Pages

The Geometry of Large Tundra Lakes Observed in Historical Maps and Satellite Images

  • Ivan Sudakov,
  • Almabrok Essa,
  • Luke Mander,
  • Ming Gong and
  • Tharanga Kariyawasam

21 October 2017

The climate of the Arctic is warming rapidly and this is causing major changes to the cycling of carbon and the distribution of permafrost in this region. Tundra lakes are key components of the Arctic climate system because they represent a source of...

  • Article
  • Open Access
100 Citations
10,471 Views
21 Pages

Phenocams Bridge the Gap between Field and Satellite Observations in an Arid Grassland Ecosystem

  • Dawn M. Browning,
  • Jason W. Karl,
  • David Morin,
  • Andrew D. Richardson and
  • Craig E. Tweedie

21 October 2017

Near surface (i.e., camera) and satellite remote sensing metrics have become widely used indicators of plant growing seasons. While robust linkages have been established between field metrics and ecosystem exchange in many land cover types, assessmen...

  • Article
  • Open Access
11 Citations
6,364 Views
22 Pages

21 October 2017

Hyperspectral unmixing aims to estimate a set of endmembers and corresponding abundances in pixels. Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and its extensions with various constraints have been widely applied to hyperspectral unmixing. L 1 / 2 ...

  • Article
  • Open Access
34 Citations
7,317 Views
20 Pages

The Methane Isotopologues by Solar Occultation (MISO) Nanosatellite Mission: Spectral Channel Optimization and Early Performance Analysis

  • Damien Weidmann,
  • Alex Hoffmann,
  • Neil Macleod,
  • Kevin Middleton,
  • Joe Kurtz,
  • Simon Barraclough and
  • Doug Griffin

21 October 2017

MISO is an in-orbit demonstration mission that focuses on improving the representation of the methane distribution throughout the upper troposphere and stratosphere, to complement and augment the nadir- and zenith-looking methane observing system for...

  • Article
  • Open Access
127 Citations
13,240 Views
21 Pages

Mapping Water Quality Parameters with Sentinel-3 Ocean and Land Colour Instrument imagery in the Baltic Sea

  • Kaire Toming,
  • Tiit Kutser,
  • Rivo Uiboupin,
  • Age Arikas,
  • Kaimo Vahter and
  • Birgot Paavel

20 October 2017

The launch of Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) on board Sentinel-3A in 2016 is the beginning of a new era in long time, continuous, high frequency water quality monitoring of coastal waters. Therefore, there is a strong need to validate the OL...

  • Article
  • Open Access
33 Citations
9,597 Views
13 Pages

20 October 2017

The Three Gorges Dam (TGD) has received increasing attention with respect to its potential effects on downstream hydro-ecosystems. Poyang Lake is the largest freshwater lake downstream of the TGD, and it is not immune to these impacts. Here, we combi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
39 Citations
9,277 Views
20 Pages

19 October 2017

The situation of stable and slightly advancing glaciers in the Karakoram is called the “Karakoram anomaly”. Glacier surface velocity is one of the key parameters of glacier dynamics and mass balance, however, the response of glacier motion to this re...

  • Article
  • Open Access
344 Citations
34,027 Views
27 Pages

Nominal 30-m Cropland Extent Map of Continental Africa by Integrating Pixel-Based and Object-Based Algorithms Using Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 Data on Google Earth Engine

  • Jun Xiong,
  • Prasad S. Thenkabail,
  • James C. Tilton,
  • Murali K. Gumma,
  • Pardhasaradhi Teluguntla,
  • Adam Oliphant,
  • Russell G. Congalton,
  • Kamini Yadav and
  • Noel Gorelick

19 October 2017

A satellite-derived cropland extent map at high spatial resolution (30-m or better) is a must for food and water security analysis. Precise and accurate global cropland extent maps, indicating cropland and non-cropland areas, are starting points to d...

  • Article
  • Open Access
41 Citations
10,530 Views
24 Pages

19 October 2017

There is an increasing need for satellite-derived accurate chlorophyll-a concentration (chla) products to improve fisheries management in coastal regions. However, the methods used to derive these products have to be evaluated, so the associated unce...

  • Article
  • Open Access
94 Citations
11,266 Views
17 Pages

The Cooling Effect of Urban Parks and Its Monthly Variations in a Snow Climate City

  • Chaobin Yang,
  • Xingyuan He,
  • Lingxue Yu,
  • Jiuchun Yang,
  • Fengqin Yan,
  • Kun Bu,
  • Liping Chang and
  • Shuwen Zhang

19 October 2017

Urban parks have been shown to form park cool islands (PCIs), which can effectively alleviate the negative influences of urban heat islands (UHI). However, few studies have examined the detailed characteristics of PCIs, the effect of urban park featu...

  • Review
  • Open Access
16 Citations
12,929 Views
41 Pages

19 October 2017

Cold regions affect global, regional and local climate; oftentimes they are relevant for water supply, host valuable ecosystems, and support human livelihood. They are thus eminently important for human society. In the context of ongoing climate chan...

  • Article
  • Open Access
22 Citations
5,830 Views
23 Pages

18 October 2017

Various glaciological topics require observations of horizontal velocities over vast areas, e.g., detecting acceleration of glaciers, as well as for estimating basal parameters of ice sheets using inverse modelling approaches. The quality of the velo...

  • Article
  • Open Access
103 Citations
12,086 Views
20 Pages

18 October 2017

To accurately estimate leaf area index (LAI) in mangrove areas, the selection of appropriate models and predictor variables is critical. However, there is a major challenge in quantifying and mapping LAI using multi-spectral sensors due to the satura...

  • Article
  • Open Access
33 Citations
5,683 Views
18 Pages

18 October 2017

Tropical deep convective clouds (DCC) are an excellent invariant target for vicarious calibration of satellite visible (VIS) and near-infrared (NIR) solar bands. The DCC technique (DCCT) is a statistical approach that collectively analyzes all identi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
20 Citations
6,035 Views
23 Pages

17 October 2017

The aim of this study was to evaluate three different strategies to improve classification accuracy in a highly fragmented semiarid area using, (i) different classification algorithms with parameter optimization in some cases; (ii) different feature...

  • Review
  • Open Access
36 Citations
15,080 Views
22 Pages

Biodiversity Monitoring in Changing Tropical Forests: A Review of Approaches and New Opportunities

  • Kalkidan Ayele Mulatu,
  • Brice Mora,
  • Lammert Kooistra and
  • Martin Herold

17 October 2017

Tropical forests host at least two-thirds of the world’s flora and fauna diversity and store 25% of the terrestrial above and belowground carbon. However, biodiversity decline due to deforestation and forest degradation of tropical forest is increasi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
6 Citations
5,299 Views
17 Pages

17 October 2017

GaoFen-4 (GF-4) imagery has very potential in terms of emergency response due to its gazing mode. However, only poor geometric accuracy can be obtained using the rational polynomial coefficient (RPC) parameters provided, making ground control points...

  • Article
  • Open Access
49 Citations
14,202 Views
14 Pages

A New Method to Map Groundwater Table in Peatlands Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

  • Mir Mustafizur Rahman,
  • Gregory J. McDermid,
  • Maria Strack and
  • Julie Lovitt

17 October 2017

Groundwater level (GWL) and depth to water (DTW) are related metrics aimed at characterizing groundwater-table positions in peatlands, and two of the most common variables collected by researchers working in these ecosystems. While well-established f...

  • Article
  • Open Access
51 Citations
6,464 Views
20 Pages

17 October 2017

Guangzhou has experienced a rapid urbanization since 1978 when China initiated the economic reform, resulting in significant land use/cover changes (LUC). To produce a time series of accurate LUC dataset that can be used to study urbanization and its...

  • Article
  • Open Access
58 Citations
9,920 Views
23 Pages

Mapping the Dabus Wetlands, Ethiopia, Using Random Forest Classification of Landsat, PALSAR and Topographic Data

  • Pierre Dubeau,
  • Douglas J. King,
  • Dikaso Gojamme Unbushe and
  • Lisa-Maria Rebelo

17 October 2017

The Dabus Wetland complex in the highlands of Ethiopia is within the headwaters of the Nile Basin and is home to significant ecological communities and rare or endangered species. Its many interrelated wetland types undergo seasonal and longer-term c...

  • Article
  • Open Access
20 Citations
6,833 Views
18 Pages

Crop Classification and LAI Estimation Using Original and Resolution-Reduced Images from Two Consumer-Grade Cameras

  • Jian Zhang,
  • Chenghai Yang,
  • Biquan Zhao,
  • Huaibo Song,
  • Wesley Clint Hoffmann,
  • Yeyin Shi,
  • Dongyan Zhang and
  • Guozhong Zhang

17 October 2017

Consumer-grade cameras are being increasingly used for remote sensing applications in recent years. However, the performance of this type of cameras has not been systematically tested and well documented in the literature. The objective of this resea...

  • Article
  • Open Access
33 Citations
8,535 Views
15 Pages

Evaluating Fourier Cross-Correlation Sub-Pixel Registration in Landsat Images

  • Jaime Almonacid-Caballer,
  • Josep E. Pardo-Pascual and
  • Luis A. Ruiz

16 October 2017

Multi-temporal analysis is one of the main applications of remote sensing, and Landsat imagery has been one of the main resources for many years. However, the moderate spatial resolution (30 m) restricts their use for high precision applications. In...

  • Article
  • Open Access
58 Citations
6,933 Views
20 Pages

The Spatial and Temporal Distributions of Absorbing Aerosols over East Asia

  • Litai Kang,
  • Siyu Chen,
  • Jianping Huang,
  • Shuman Zhao,
  • Xiaojun Ma,
  • Tiangang Yuan,
  • Xiaorui Zhang and
  • Tingting Xie

16 October 2017

Absorbing aerosols can strongly absorb solar radiation and have a profound impact on the global and regional climate. Black carbon (BC), organic carbon (OC) and dust are three major types of absorbing aerosols. In order to deepen the overall understa...

  • Review
  • Open Access
141 Citations
19,283 Views
29 Pages

MERLIN: A French-German Space Lidar Mission Dedicated to Atmospheric Methane

  • Gerhard Ehret,
  • Philippe Bousquet,
  • Clémence Pierangelo,
  • Matthias Alpers,
  • Bruno Millet,
  • James B. Abshire,
  • Heinrich Bovensmann,
  • John P. Burrows,
  • Frédéric Chevallier and
  • Martin Wirth
  • + 20 authors

16 October 2017

The MEthane Remote sensing Lidar missioN (MERLIN) aims at demonstrating the spaceborne active measurement of atmospheric methane, a potent greenhouse gas, based on an Integrated Path Differential Absorption (IPDA) nadir-viewing LIght Detecting and Ra...

  • Technical Note
  • Open Access
25 Citations
15,879 Views
20 Pages

A Workflow for Automated Satellite Image Processing: from Raw VHSR Data to Object-Based Spectral Information for Smallholder Agriculture

  • Dimitris Stratoulias,
  • Valentyn Tolpekin,
  • Rolf A. De By,
  • Raul Zurita-Milla,
  • Vasilios Retsios,
  • Wietske Bijker,
  • Mohammad Alfi Hasan and
  • Eric Vermote

14 October 2017

Earth Observation has become a progressively important source of information for land use and land cover services over the past decades. At the same time, an increasing number of reconnaissance satellites have been set in orbit with ever increasing s...

  • Article
  • Open Access
38 Citations
8,940 Views
22 Pages

A New Online Service for the Validation of Multi-GNSS Orbits Using SLR

  • Radosław Zajdel,
  • Krzysztof Sośnica and
  • Grzegorz Bury

14 October 2017

In the last decade, we have been witnessing a rapid development of the constellations of Global and Regional Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS/RNSS). Besides the well-known GPS and GLONASS, newly developed systems such as Galileo, BeiDou, QZSS and N...

  • Article
  • Open Access
111 Citations
9,453 Views
17 Pages

Application of InSAR Techniques to an Analysis of the Guanling Landslide

  • Ya Kang,
  • Chaoying Zhao,
  • Qin Zhang,
  • Zhong Lu and
  • Bin Li

13 October 2017

On the afternoon of 28 June 2010, an enormous landslide occurred in the Gangwu region of Guanling County, Guizhou Province. In order to better understand the mechanism of the Guanling landslide, archived ALOS/PALSAR data was used to acquire the defor...

  • Article
  • Open Access
106 Citations
8,959 Views
18 Pages

13 October 2017

The change in snow cover under climate change is poorly understood in Tianshan Mountains. Here, we investigate the spatiotemporal characteristics and trends of snow-covered area (SCA) and snow-covered days (SCD) in the Tianshan Mountains by using the...

  • Article
  • Open Access
19 Citations
4,925 Views
20 Pages

13 October 2017

This paper intends to find a more cost-effective way for training oil spill classification systems by introducing active learning (AL) and exploring its potential, so that satisfying classifiers could be learned with reduced number of labeled samples...

  • Article
  • Open Access
11 Citations
5,013 Views
15 Pages

13 October 2017

We propose new indicators for bivalve (oyster and mussel) beds on exposed intertidal flats, derived from dual-copolarization (HH + VV) TerraSAR-X, Radarsat-2, and ALOS-2 images of the German North Sea coast. Our analyses are based upon the Kennaugh e...

  • Article
  • Open Access
19 Citations
5,700 Views
19 Pages

Feature-Based Nonlocal Polarimetric SAR Filtering

  • Xiaoli Xing,
  • Qihao Chen,
  • Shuai Yang and
  • Xiuguo Liu

13 October 2017

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images are inherently contaminated by multiplicative speckle noise, which complicates the image interpretation and image analyses. To reduce the speckle effect, several adaptive speckle filters have been...

  • Reply
  • Open Access
2,909 Views
2 Pages

12 October 2017

We would like to thank our colleague, Christoph Kern, for his comment [1] on our recent paper [2], which provides a valuable adjunct to that published piece [...]

  • Article
  • Open Access
16 Citations
4,481 Views
21 Pages

12 October 2017

Change detection (CD) for multitemporal hyperspectral images (HSI) can be approached as classification consisting of two steps, change feature extraction and change identification. This paper is focused on binary classification of the changed and the...

  • Article
  • Open Access
169 Citations
14,870 Views
27 Pages

12 October 2017

Classification of hyperspectral image (HSI) is an important research topic in the remote sensing community. Significant efforts (e.g., deep learning) have been concentrated on this task. However, it is still an open issue to classify the high-dimensi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
23 Citations
7,207 Views
16 Pages

11 October 2017

Uniformly-spaced apertures or subapertures of large, densely-sampled, discrete linear receiver arrays are often used in remote sensing to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by coherent beamforming that reduces noise coming from directions outsi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
25 Citations
5,933 Views
19 Pages

11 October 2017

As China is suffering from severe fine particle pollution from dense industrialization and urbanization, satellite-derived aerosol optical depth (AOD) has been widely used for estimating particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 μ...

  • Addendum
  • Open Access
2,835 Views
1 Page

11 October 2017

After publication of the research paper [1], it was found that funding information was missing from the Acknowledgment part [...]

  • Article
  • Open Access
18 Citations
6,763 Views
20 Pages

11 October 2017

The key to simulating soil erosion is to calculate the vegetation cover (C) factor. Methods that apply remote sensing to calculate the C factor at a regional scale cannot directly use the C factor formula. That is because the C factor formula is obta...

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Remote Sens. - ISSN 2072-4292