Monitoring Land Cover Change: Towards Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

The UN FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization), in its State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture (2014), confirmed that “land and water resources are central to agriculture and rural development, and are intrinsically linked to global challenges of food insecurity and poverty, climate change adaptation and mitigation, as well as degradation and depletion of natural resources that affect the livelihoods of millions of rural people across the world.” They also projected that food production will need to increase by 70 percent to feed the world’s growing population. Land and water resources are already under heavy stress from economic development, so that future agricultural production will need to be more efficient and sustainable. Land use is undergoing changes in many parts of the world and there is considerable interest in understanding the impacts of those changes and whether they are sustainable.

Earth observation data can now provide important information for research focusing on sustainability, better than ever. In particular, the increased availability of free and open data from multimodal sources of remote sensing systems is allowing the close monitoring of land-use change and develop relevant scenarios, in order to study the hydrological cycle, the carbon footprint of land utilization and the demand for food production. Remote sensing can provide information on the impacts of land-cover change on abiotic/biotic variables, associated with ecosystem functions and services, which are involved in the water-energy-food nexus.

This Special Issue emerged from contributions of the accepted abstracts at the 38th EARSeL Symposium and the 3rd joint EARSeL LULC & NASA LCLUC Workshop that took place, respectively, on 9–12 and 11–12 July, 2018, Chania, Greece.

The Special Issue is now accepting relevant submissions, focused on any of the relevant topics and the scope of Land journal. Submissions will be accepted until the 31st of December 2020.

The topics linked to those events include:

• New instruments and data processing methods
• Geological, hydrological, land and ice applications
• Climate and climate change
• Agriculture and Forestry
• Urban and Thermal remote sensing
• Use of LIDAR and RADAR data for various applications
• Applications employing UAVs and UASs
• Synergy of remote sensing technologies for land-use change monitoring-
• The role of earth observations within the Water–Energy–Food nexus
• Social and behavioral aspects of land use supported by remote sensing observations
• Advances and outlook in the processing and analysis of remotely sensed data

Dr. Ioannis Manakos
Dr. Garik Gutman
Dr. Chariton Kalaitzidis
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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