Drones in Hydrological Research and Management
A special issue of Drones (ISSN 2504-446X). This special issue belongs to the section "Drones in Ecology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 February 2026 | Viewed by 1305
Special Issue Editors
Interests: image analysis; time series analysis, and clustering; optimization; machine learning
Interests: earth sciences; data science; GIS; hydroinformatics; machine learning; deep learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: remote sensing for hydrology and hydrological modeling; remote sensing for urban hydrology and urban ecosystem services; hydro-ecological processes monitoring and modeling; wetlands applications; aquatic remote sensing; water stress detection
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The use of drones in hydrological research and management is transforming the way of monitoring water bodies and managing water resources. Drones equipped with a range of sensors, from cameras to LiDAR and multispectral imaging systems have emerged as powerful tools for collecting high-resolution spatial and temporal data, enabling researchers and stakeholders to gain deeper insights into complex water systems with greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness compared to conventional methods, such as manual data collection.
The potential of drones extends to a wide range of hydrological applications, such as flood monitoring and disaster response, tracking changes in the water body ecosystem, calibrate and validate hydrological models, analyze sediment transport, and many other applications. Drones enable to collect data efficiently by the means of time and human-power even in the regions that are hard or dangerous to reach. Fast and easy data collection provides an opportunity to collect data frequently, detect and identify changes, and therefore make timely and sustainable decisions for water resource, risk, or disaster management.
This Special Issue aims at collecting emerging technologies, innovative methodologies, best practices, and applications of using Drones in Hydrological Research and Management.
We welcome submissions which provide the community with the most recent advancements on all aspects of Drones in Hydrological Research and Management, including but not limited to:
- Drones for disaster (flood, drought, pollution, etc.) forecast and management
- Drones for water quality monitoring
- Drones for bathymetry mapping
- Drone applications for reservoir and dam inspection
- Drones for sediment transport analysis
- Drones for ecosystem condition assessment
- Drones for calibration and validation of hydrological model
- Any use of drones related to hydrological research and management.
Dr. Dalia Calneryte
Dr. Robert Szczepanek
Prof. Dr. Jarosław Chormański
Guest Editors
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Drones is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 2600 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
- hydrological research
- disaster management
- image analysis
- machine learning
- sustainable development
- water quality
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