Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the application period is now open for the 2021 Remote Sensing Travel Awards. The applications will be assessed by an Evaluation Committee chaired by the Section Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing, Prof. Gerrit de Leeuw.

Applicants must be postdoctoral researchers or Ph.D. students working in the field of remote sensing or related areas. The awards provide financial assistance for two winners to present an oral presentation and/or poster at an international conference in 2021.

Required application documents:
– An abstract of the work you plan to present at the conference;
– A short CV with a list of selected publications;
– A letter of support from your supervisor;
– A 3–4-minute video where you talk about the presentation or manuscript you are going to present at the conference.

The two awards will consist of 800 Swiss Francs each.

Please submit the online application by 28 February, 2021. Winners will be announced on the Remote Sensing webpage by the end of March 2021.

Dear Colleagues,

Authors are increasingly interested in having their papers published as a cover story in Remote Sensing. So far, 24 cover stories were published in 2020. These cover stories reported important research results, or innovative methods, and presented impressive images. To reward the authors who published important research results in Remote Sensing, we are announcing the Remote Sensing 2020 Best Cover Awards.

Five cover stories will be chosen from the 2020 cover stories and each will receive 100 CHF. The criteria that will be considered for selection are as follows:

– Importance or innovation of the research;
– Open to all career levels;
– Quality of the cover image.

We will randomly select the votes of 10 participants and, to show our appreciation of your involvement in the voting process, the 10 selected participants will each receive a 50 CHF voucher. The vote will be open from 20 January 2021 to 20 February 2021.

Please cast your vote here (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MRYTHLQ).

The winners will be announced on the journal website by the end of March 2021.

On behalf of the Section Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Clement Atzberger, we wish to acknowledge our reviewers who so generously give their time to review papers submitted to Remote Sensing by presenting an award to reviewers who have demonstrated their dedication, professionalism, and timeliness in reviewing manuscripts for Remote Sensing.

Although anonymous peer-review is one of the cornerstones of publishing high-quality comprehensive manuscripts for the advancement of science and engineering research, it is also often one of the most underappreciated of the many requests and demands made of subject experts. It is for this reason that the Remote Sensing Editorial Team is extremely grateful to reviewers for the time, energy, and dedication that they freely give to support their peers.

What are the pre-requisites to be eligible for this award?
All of the reviewers for Remote Sensing in 2020 will be automatically included.

What will the winners receive?
There will be ten awardees this year.
The top five winners will receive the following:
– 500 Swiss francs (CHF);
– A certificate;
– A chance to publish a paper free-of-charge in Remote Sensing. A further five winners will receive the following:
– A certificate;
– A chance to publish a paper free-of-charge in Remote Sensing.

When will the winners be announced?
The winners will be announced in February 2021 on the journal website.

How can I make myself eligible?
If you have not yet reviewed papers for the journal, but would like to do so, you can easily register as a reviewer at: https://susy.mdpi.com/volunteer/profile/edit.

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that Remote Sensing is now inviting nominations for the Remote Sensing 2021 Young Investigator Award. This prize will be given to one young investigator in recognition of their excellence in the field of Remote Sensing. All nominations will be assessed by an Evaluation Committee led by the Associate Editor, Prof. Dr. Jose Moreno.

The prize:
– 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs).

Eligibility and Requirements:
– Ground-breaking contribution to the advancement of remote sensing science or applications; 
– Age under 35 years (as of 31 December, 2020).
– Candidates must be nominated by senior researchers, research directors, or department heads.

List of Documents for Nomination:
– Curriculum Vitae and list of publications;
– Birth certificate or other proof of age;
– Nomination letter from two senior researchers, research directors, or department heads.

How to submit nominations?
The nominations must be submitted online at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/awards/901.

For any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected]. We look forward to receiving your nominations.

Prof. Dr. Jose Moreno
Associate Editor, Remote Sensing

The editorial team would like to congratulate the winners of the Remote Sensing 2020 Outstanding Contribution Awards, who were selected based on the citation data downloaded in the Web of Science and finally approved by the EiC, Dr. Prasad S. Thenkabail. They will receive 1000 CHF and an electronic certificate.

Transferring Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for the Scene Classification of High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery (10.3390/rs71114680) by Fan Hu, Gui-Song Xia, Jingwen Hu and Liangpei Zhang

A Non-Stationary 1981–2012 AVHRR NDVI_3g Time Series (10.3390/rs6086929) by Jorge E. Pinzon and Compton J. Tucker

Their research results have received a very high frequency of citations. We believe these two papers have contributed greatly to the field of Remote Sensing. The authors are also respected in the related field.

Regulations
– In order to maximize the impact of candidate articles, we decided to hold this award every two years.
– The next edition will be held in 2022, and the candidate articles will have been published in 2016 and 2017.

Remote Sensing Editorial Office

Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of Remote Sensing, we would like to congratulate Dr. Pietro Milillo as the winner of the 2020 Remote Sensing Young Investigator Award, aer a rigorous selection process with many excellent candidates from all around the world.

Dr. Pietro Milillo works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, USA as a Research Scientist. He has a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Basilicata, Potenza, Italy, with a thesis on the synergistic use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) constellations for studying natural and anthropogenic phenomena. Pietro started his studies in Physics in 2008 at the University of Bari (Italy), graduating with a B.S. in 2010 and M.S. in 2012 in Physics and Applied Physics, respectively.

His research focuses on the synergistic use of remote sensing and ground-based data exploitation for Earth and Cryosphere science and Natural Hazard response. He is particularly interested in analyzing how the new generation of remote sensing instruments are leading to more eective near real-time disaster monitoring, assessment, and response, and a greater ability to constrain dynamically changing physical processes, improving our understanding of basic Earth science.

In his research, he aims to advance geodetic and geophysical measurements together with numerical modeling of geophysical processes characterizing the cryosphere (glaciers mass balance, short term grounding zone dynamics, surface elevation changes) and infrastructure monitoring, highlighting critical conditions that could lead to infrastructure damage or collapse.

Dr. Pietro Milillo will receive 2000 Swiss Francs for his groundbreaking contributions to Earth Sciences, in particular Cryosphere and Natural Hazard research.

Prof. Dr. Jose Moreno
Associate Editor of Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 Travel Awards sponsored by Remote Sensing.

Ms. Morgan Crowley is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University, Canada. She will attend the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2020, 3–8 May, 2020, in Vienna, Austria to present her paper “Mapping and Comparing Wildland Fire Progressions Using Freely Available, Multi-Source Satellite Data”.

Dr. Florent Poux is a post-doctoral fellow at Geomatics Unit, University of Liège, Belgium. He will attend the 3DGeoInfo2020: 3D GeoInfo 2020, 8–11 September, 2020, in London, U.K. to present his paper “Region Growing for Efficient Segmentation of Large Point Clouds”.

Each Travel Award consists of a certificate and 800 CHF to attend an academic conference of their choice in 2020. Congratulations to the winners of this highly competitive travel award.

We would like to thank all the Evaluation Committee members for their assiduous evaluation of the candidates, and all the applicants for submitting their fascinating research encompassing a diverse range of topics.

Dr. Xiaofeng Li
Advisory Board Member of Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the winners of “Remote Sensing 2019 Best Cover Award”. The winners of the “Remote Sensing 2019 Best Cover Award”, in no particular order, will receive 100 CHF each. They are as follows:

– Issue 2 (January 2, 2019)
Bathymetry of Northwest Greenland Using “Ocean Melting Greenland” (OMG) High-Resolution Airborne Gravity and Other Data (doi:10.3390/rs11020131)

– Issue 4 (February 2, 2019)
NASA’s Early Adopter Program Links Satellite Data to Decision Making (doi:10.3390/rs11040406)

– Issue 6 (March 2, 2019)
A Method for Landsat and Sentinel 2 (HLS) BRDF Normalization (doi:10.3390/rs11060632)

– Issue 7 (April 1, 2019)
Resolving Fine-Scale Surface Features on Polar Sea Ice: A First Assessment of UAS Photogrammetry Without Ground Control (doi:10.3390/rs11070784)

– Issue 13 (July 1, 2019)
Mid-Season Crop Classification Using Dual-, Compact-, and Full-Polarization in Preparation for the Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) (doi:10.3390/rs11131582)

Congratulations to the winners for their excellent research!

We selected 10 participants, who will receive a 50 CHF voucher each.

Franz Waldner, Brian Huberty, Isaac August, Xiaojuan Li, Calimanut Ionut Cira, Ugur Alganci, Juan Carlos Jimenez, Yan Liu, Zhenhong Li, Francesco Valerio.

Thanks everyone for your participation.

Dear Colleagues,

The Remote Sensing Editorial Board and Editorial Team would like to gratefully acknowledge the time and energy given by reviewers in checking manuscripts submitted to Remote Sensing. It is due to their efforts that the high quality of the journal and quick turnaround is maintained.

The following referees have been selected to receive Remote Sensing 2019 Outstanding Reviewer Awards for the quantity, timeliness and quality of their reviews in 2019:

The top five winners:

Stefania Bonafoni
Department of Engineering, University of Perugia, 06125 Perugia, Italy

Veraldo Liesenberg
Forest Engineering Department, Santa Catarina State University (UDESC), Lages 88520-000, Brazil

Ryo Natsuaki
Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

Daniel Sousa
La Kretz Research Center at Sedgwick Reserve and National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Earth Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93101, USA

Lorenzo Solari
Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC/CERCA), Geomatics Division, 08860, Castelldefels, Spain

A further five winners:

Michael J. Abrams
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA

Ram Avtar
Graduate School of Environmental Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-0810, Japan

Chiman Kwan
Signal Processing Inc., Rockville, Maryland, MD 20850, USA

Buddhika Madurapperuma
Department of Forestry and Wildland Resources, Department of Environmental Science and Management, Arcata, CA 95521, USA

Krzysztof Sośnica
Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformatics, Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences, 50-375 Wroclaw, Poland

We are pleased to announce the “Remote Sensing 10th Anniversary Best Paper Award”, which marks the 10th anniversary of Remote Sensing in 2018. Nominations from all papers published from 2009 to 2018 were made by the Evaluation Committee and finally approved by the EiC, Dr. Prasad S. Thenkabail. Following a review process by the Evaluation Committee, 10 final winners were selected. The recipients of the “Remote Sensing 10th Anniversary Best Paper Award”, in no particular order, are as follows.

Special Award: (the certificate and 1000 CHF)

• Unmanned Aircraft Systems in Remote Sensing and Scientific Research: Classification
  and Considerations of Use (doi:10.3390/rs4061671)

Rank 1 Award: (the certificate and 800 CHF each)

• A Non-Stationary 1981–2012 AVHRR NDVI3g Time Series (doi:10.3390/rs6086929)
• Advances in Remote Sensing of Agriculture: Context Description, Existing Operational Monitoring Systems and Major Information Needs (doi:10.3390/rs5020949)

Rank 2 Award: (the certificate and 600 CHF each)

• An Automated Technique for Generating Georectified Mosaics from Ultra-High Resolution Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Imagery, Based on Structure from Motion (SfM) Point Clouds (doi:10.3390/rs4051392)
• An International Comparison of Individual Tree Detection and Extraction Using Airborne Laser Scanning (doi:10.3390/rs4040950)
• Global Data Sets of Vegetation Leaf Area Index (LAI)3g and Fraction of Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FPAR)3g Derived from Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI3g) for the Period 1981 to 2011 (doi:10.3390/rs5020927)

Rank 3 Award: (the certificate and 400 CHF each)

• Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) Technique for Landslide Characterization and Monitoring (doi:10.3390/rs5031045)
• A Review of the Application of Optical and Radar Remote Sensing Data Fusion to Land Use Mapping and  Monitoring (doi:10.3390/rs8010070)
• Remote Sensing of Coral Reefs for Monitoring and Management: A Review (doi:10.3390/rs8020118)
• The EnMAP Spaceborne Imaging Spectroscopy Mission for Earth Observation
  (doi:10.3390/rs70708830)

Congratulations to the winners for their excellent research!

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 Travel Awards sponsored by Remote Sensing.

Dr. Hugo Carreno-Luengo is a researcher at the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), Spain, whose research interests include the use of GNSS-R techniques to perform Earth remote sensing from nanosatellites. He has worked at two world-leading research centres in this field: the team of Prof. A. Camps at the Polytechnic of Catalonia, and with the team at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)—Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Mr. Saman Ghaffarian, a PhD candidate at University of Twente, Netherlands, has been focusing on advanced image processing and the developing of new proxies, as well as data analysis methods to revolutionize the way post-disaster recovery is assessed. Recently, he published a major review article on the use of image-based proxies in disaster risk management “Remote Sensing-Based Proxies for Urban Disaster Risk Management and Resilience: A Review” (doi: 10.3390/rs10111760)

Each Travel Award consists of a certificate and 800 CHF to attend an academic conference of their choice in 2019. Congratulations to the winners of this highly competitive travel award.

We would like to thank all the Evaluation Committee members for their assiduous evaluation of the candidates, and all the applicants for submitting their fascinating research encompassing a diverse range of topics.

Dr. Xiaofeng Li
Section Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of the journal Remote Sensing, we would like to congratulate Dr. Jian Peng as the winner of the 2019 Remote Sensing Young Investigator Award. The Award will consist of 2000 Swiss Francs.

Dr. Jian Peng works in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. He gained a Ph.D. in Earth Science from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M). Before joining the University of Oxford, he was a research scientist at the University of Munich (LMU) and a post-doc researcher at MPI-M.

In his research, he aims to use satellite remote sensing (optical/thermal/microwave) to monitor the Earth’s water cycle and to understand the variability of hydrological processes across multiple space and time scales. He has developed novel approaches to quantifying the water cycle’s components, such as soil moisture, evaporation, and precipitation from satellite observations. In particular, he has combined multiple data sources together to improve the spatial resolution of satellite-based soil moisture and developed a novel framework for the generation of high-resolution land surface water and energy fluxes from state-of-the-art satellite data.

His current research focuses on exploring the teleconnection between hydrological variability and climate oscillations based on satellite observations. He is also working towards using satellite data to quantify the spatial–temporal patterns of hydroclimatic extremes, and to assess their impacts on agriculture, environment, and society.

Dr. Jian Peng will receive 2000 Swiss Francs for his groundbreaking contributions to hydrology research.

Prof. Dr. Jose Moreno
Associate Editor of Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

The Remote Sensing Editorial Board and Editorial Team would like to gratefully acknowledge the time and energy given by reviewers in checking manuscripts submitted to Remote Sensing. It is due to their efforts that the high quality of the journal and quick turnaround is maintained.

The following referees have been selected to receive “Remote Sensing 2018 Outstanding Reviewer Awards” for the quantity, timeliness and quality of their reviews in 2018:

The top five winners:

Mahyar Aboutalebi
Utah Water Research Laboratory, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84321, USA.

Stefania Bonafoni
Department of Engineering, University of Perugia, 06125, Perugia, Italy.

Christopher E. Sioris
Environment and Climate Change Canada, Toronto, Ontario, M3H 5T4, Canada.

Matthieu Molinier
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd., PL 1000, FI-02044 VTT, Finland.

Chiman Kwan
Signal Processing, Inc., Rockville, Maryland, MD 20850, USA.

A further five winners:

Andrea Buono
Engineering Department, University of Naples “Parthenope”, 80100 Napoli, Italy.

Majid Nazeer
COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI), Islamabad 45550, Pakistan.

Antonio Miguel Ruiz-Armenteros
Departamento de Ingeniería Cartográfica, Universidad de Jaén, 23071
Jaén, Spain.

John C. Trinder
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of New
South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.

Nasser Najibi
The City University of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA.

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Travel Awards sponsored by Remote Sensing.

Travel Awards were granted to Jing Liu, a PhD student at the University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands and Emma Izquierdo-Verdiguier, a postdoctoral researcher at the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL), University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain.

Dr. Jing Liu’s research focusses on Earth Observation for forest ecology, in particular the mapping of forest structure using LiDAR and passive remote-sensing technology. Amongst other topics, Jing studied the horizontal and vertical distribution of forest bio-physical variables such as leaf area index and leaf angle distribution, clumping and terrain effects interfering with such retrievals, as well as possibilities for automated segmentation of tree crowns.

Dr. Emma Izquierdo-Verdiguier holds a PhD and is conducting research in the field of machine learning for remote-sensing data analysis, including supervised and unsupervised classification and clustering and biophysical parameter estimation. Emma is particularly interested in improving the capacity of support vector machines for classification tasks and in the use of Earth Observation data for land surface phenology.

Each award consists of 800 Swiss Francs to attend an academic conference in 2018.

Prof. Dr. Clement Atzberger
Section Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of the journal Remote Sensing, we would like to congratulate Dr. Robert Brewin as the winner of the 2018 Remote Sensing Young Investigator Award.

Dr. Brewin works in the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, United Kingdom, having obtained his PhD in Satellite Oceanography at the University of Plymouth.

He has an outstanding publication record of 58 papers, including 16 in Remote Sensing of Environment,along with some high impact papers in Nature Geoscience and Scientific Reports.

He is Co-Investigator of NERC’s National Centre for Earth Observation, and serves on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Plankton Research.

He is also Guest Editor for Remote Sensing Journal Special Issue “Remote Sensing of Ocean Colour”.

Dr. Brewin will receive 2,000 Swiss Francs for his ground-breaking contributions to the advancement of remote sensing in oceans and phytoplankton research.

Dr. Alfredo R. Huete
Associate Editor of Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the two winners of the 2017 Travel Awards sponsored by Remote Sensing:

Travel Awards were granted to Dr. David Chaparro, a PhD student at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, IEEC/UPC, Barcelona, Spain and Dr. Wai Yeung Yan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Civil Engineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Dr. David Chaparro’s research involves the application of remote sensing data derived from microwave radiometers. During his PhD, he analysed surface moisture and temperature trends to anticipate drought conditions linked to wildfire activity. His results led to the development of a new fire risk model. In his current research, SMAP measurements of soil moisture and vegetation optical depth are being used as indicators of crop yields and phenology.

Dr. Wai Yeung Yan’s research activities focus on improving the radiometric quality of multispectral LiDAR intensity data so as to facilitate applications toward surface classification and object recognition. He developed radiometric and BRDF corrections, and normalization models for different LiDAR sensors, demonstrating significant improvements in data quality and classification accuracy.

The awards consist of 800 Swiss Francs each to attend an academic conference in 2017.

Dr. Alfredo R. Huete
Associate Editor of Remote Sensing