Impact of Climate Change on Vegetation and Water Scarcity using Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

Under the influence of changing climate, population growth, urbanization, land use changes and poor water management, water scarcity has become crucial worldwide especially in arid, semi-arid and subtropical regions. Future projections estimated that by the year 2025, every one in four individuals on Earth might be suffering from water scarcity. Moreover, extreme weather events such as heat waves, agricultural and hydrological droughts, and precipitation extremes affected global water demand, limiting rain-fed and irrigated vegetation potential. The impact of such water scarcity is amplified by inefficient irrigation practices, especially since irrigation consumes more than 70% of the available water in these regions. Besides, crop water stress can be detected by the in-situ measurements are generally expensive, time consuming, and not available over extended areas. In such circumstances, remote sensing provides an alternative and cost-effective method for mapping and monitoring broad areas and can be used to assess crop water stress and changes in vegetation cover through retrieving different biophysical crop variables from a multi-sensor.

Furthermore, extreme climatic events are predicted to increase both in the frequency and magnitude due to global warming, but their ecological effects are poorly understood particularly in forest ecosystems. Remote sensing data’s accessibility, diversity, quality, and computing capacity provide new opportunities to understand the impact of extreme climatic and disturbance events on vegetation. In the last several decades, long-term and synchronous remote sensing observations have allowed an improved understanding of ecosystems dynamics affected by extreme climatic and disturbance events globally. This will provide a better understanding of vegetation’s role in the Earth system and its resilience to environmental threats.

In this Special Issue, we are looking for original scientific contributions on assessment of water scarcity, identification of water stressed hotspots, decrease in vegetation cover, crop water stress, impact of agriculture drought, control of climate change impacts, remote sensing of climate extremes, statistical indices addressing drought recovery, and its spatiotemporal patterns using different Remote Sensing datasets, are highly encouraged.

Prof. Dr. Xieyao Ma
Prof. Dr. Xiefei Zhi
Prof. Dr. Kamran Azam
Dr. Irfan Ullah
Guest Editors

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