UAVs and Satellite Data for Forest Protection: Remote Sensing, Monitoring, Fire Detection and Emergency Management

Dear Colleagues,

The protection of forests is a critical challenge that needs to be faced to preserve our ecosystem and oppose climate change.

Forests are subject to several risks, spacing from illegal logging to desertification and wildfires, which require the employment of complex protection systems that use a broad spectrum of specialized technologies.

In this direction, UAVs offer the capability of remotely monitoring vast areas and dynamically responding to emergency scenarios, a feature that ground sensor networks and human operators cannot provide as effectively.

The combination of UAVs with other data sources, such as satellite imaging and weather stations, may offer rich and timely decision support to their operators, guiding their actions in the prevention, detection, and response phases of the emergency management process.

This Special Issue aims at providing an overview of the latest applications and developments in forest protection systems that benefit from aerial drones, also encouraging contributions that combine satellite information and ground data with aerial measurements.

Potential topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Fire detection;
• UAV patrolling and surveillance systems;
• Formation control;
• Flight control systems;
• Remote sensing hardware design;
• UAV intelligence;
• Data fusion techniques for forest protection;
• Machine learning for pattern recognition and anomaly detection.

Dr. Alessandro Giuseppi
Dr. Francesco Liberati
Guest Editors

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