UAV Remote Sensing for Environmental and Agricultural Applications
A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sciences".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2026 | Viewed by 167
Editor
Interests: geomatics; geoinformation; UAV; LiDAR; multispectral sensors; mapping; environmental monitoring; vegetation modelling; earth digital twins; precision agriculture; engineering; remote sensing; proximal sensing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been increasingly applied for environmental and agricultural monitoring. Their cost-effectiveness, operational flexibility, and their ability to support frequent acquisitions and multiple sensor payloads make UAVs particularly suitable for analysing environmental dynamics and ecosystem processes in both natural and agricultural systems.
Data collected using passive and active optical sensors have expanded the range of analyses that can be conducted at high spatial and temporal resolutions through the combination with other disciplines such as remote sensing, computer vision, artificial intelligence, geographical information systems (GIS), and geoinformatics for applied environmental monitoring.
Despite the widespread use of UAV-based remote sensing, several practical challenges remain. These include the consistency of multitemporal acquisition, sensor calibration and different platforms comparability, the scalability and replicability of monitoring approaches, the integration with in situ data, and the extreme variability of natural and agricultural.
This Special Issue focuses on applied studies of UAV systems for environmental and agricultural monitoring, with particular attention to optical sensors, including multispectral, hyperspectral, thermal cameras, and LiDAR, and discusses operational constraints and solutions encountered in real-world applications.
Contributions that clearly consider the temporal dimension of monitoring activities are encouraged.
Submissions analysing calibration procedures and operational workflows for assessing errors and uncertainties in multitemporal analyses are particularly encouraged. Additional contributions may address the design of UAV-based monitoring systems, including multi-sensor configurations, as well as applied investigations of the relationship between the physical properties of observed targets and the characteristics of the sensors used.
In this Special Issue, original research articles and review papers are welcome. Research topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Analysis of terrain morphological and volumetric variations.
- Two-dimensional and three-dimensional change detection.
- Monitoring of hydrological processes, including extreme events.
- Integration of in situ measurements with UAV-based remote sensing data.
- Design and implementation of automated UAV monitoring systems.
- Precision agriculture applications.
- Vegetation health assessment.
- Object detection and semantic analysis of UAV data.
- Biomass monitoring.
- Land cover and land use change analysis.
Dr. Elena Belcore
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- UAV
- remote sensing
- monitoring
- agriculture
- environment
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