Drones for Green Areas, Green Infrastructure and Landscape Monitoring

Dear Colleagues,

The use of drones is growing all around the world, with new applications and usages emerging in the most recent decade. Drones are being used in precision agriculture and smart cities for multiple purposes, as well as in multiple other areas. There is a union between precision agriculture and smart cities, urban agriculture, green areas, and green infrastructure. The use of drones in these specific aspects commenced in the last three years and has multiple benefits for improving the sustainability of cities. Multiple aspects boost the use of drones in these areas, such as the reduced extension of surveillance areas compared with general agriculture and the elevated input requirements. Moreover, managing multiple plant species in gardens compared with monospecific agricultural systems can benefit from the information drones provide.

This Special Issue aims to collect the latest advances on this topic, including possible applications, such as gardens and sports areas, and the required drones, cameras, and flying conditions to ensure that the data are suitable for managers. There is a high variability of green areas and multiple cropped species, and different aspects are to be monitored, supposing multiple drone use approaches in this framework. Some drone uses might go beyond image capturing and could include using LiDAR or other sensors for environmental monitoring and their use as a platform for treatment applications. The generation of point clouds to recreate gardens, with virtual and extended reality allowing for visiting singular locations or automatically recognizing and classifying the landscape and plant species, can be achieved using drones. Moreover, creating a network combining drones and on-ground vehicles or on-ground sensors to provide a comprehensive monitoring solution is a potential future use of drones. The combination of drones and artificial intelligence to change the flying parameters to allow for adaptative behavior to the environment or sensed data is another issue at the edge of new development. In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Environmental monitoring;
- Remote sensing;
- Gardens monitoring;
- Landscape evaluation;
- Time-series analyses;
- Point cloud;
- Drones and AI;
- Smart city;
- Sustainable green areas;
- Water management;
- Drones mesh.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Lorena Parra
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 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.

• precision urban agriculture
• remote sensing
• unmanned aerial vehicles
• green areas
• image processing
• object detection
• green infrastructure