Drones for Natural Hazards

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have undergone incredible technological development and, at the same time, developed an even wider application range. Consecutively, systems that offer high-resolution/-quality data products acquired in a non-invasive and remote manner are very widely adopted in the disaster risk management cycle—preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. Scholars and professionals alike are implementing and continue to develop applications of UAVs and intelligent swarms for a variety of tasks ranging from hazard mapping and monitoring to more operational ones such as emergency response and search and rescue.

In addition, UAV derived high resolutions datasets from passive or active sensors, are great assets for improving and validating spaceborne applications in the disaster domain.

Furthermore, the data products from such aerial systems are easy to implement with geographic information systems and combined with geospatial artificial intelligence are further advancing the progress and develop the scientific research, and decision-making processes.

Finally, the availability of consumer grade UAVs at affordable price is a main driving factor for adopting citizen science contribution to the risk-related activities.

We are pleased to invite you to submit manuscripts to the MDPI journal Drones for our Special Issue “Drones for Natural Hazards”. Articles should be related to but not limited by the considered topics:

• UAV photogrammetry and remote sensing
• Change detection
• Emergency response
• RTK/PPK- and GCP- based orientation and processing methods
• Novel cloud processing services
• New approaches for hazard monitoring and mapping
• UAV Citizen science through collaborative approaches and platforms
• Integration and validation and of satellite-based outputs through UAV-based observations

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Remote Sensing.

Dr. Vasil Yordanov
Dr. Luigi Barazzetti
Prof. Dr. Maria Antonia Brovelli
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 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-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.