Image Analysis for Forest Environmental Monitoring

Dear Colleagues,

Forests are key resources for sustaining life on earth. They act as carbon sinks and are one of the most effective ways of fighting climate change. They are one of the most important sources of renewable energies in the form of wood fuel – currently as much as solar, hydroelectric and wind power combined. Forests cover about 30% of the total land area on earth and are the home of 80% of the planet’s terrestrial species (50% of the animals). They are, thus, one of the most valuable public assets on the planet that needs to be protected from many threats coming mostly from human activity: agriculture, wildfires, urbanization, unregulated timber extraction. Large-scale and mid-scale monitoring of forest environments can be done in cost-effective ways through remote sensing and airborne or land-based sensor analysis, automating many of the processes with current machine learning and pattern recognition methods. Higher quality sensors (higher resolution, spectral bands) and acquisition technologies are becoming increasingly available both for new earth observation satellites, terrestrial observation towers, and aerial vehicles (manned and unmanned). Both individually and in combination, these different observation methods can provide valuable data for resource management policies or first response action to abnormal events.

This Special Issue will accept papers on all aspects of the acquisition and analysis of aerial image (latu sensu, including RGB, hyperspectral, multispectral, LiDAR, Radar), and video acquired from airborne and/or spaceborne sensors, that have an impact in the monitoring of forest environments. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Classification, detection, and segmentation of vegetation cover.
• Detection and tracking for monitoring animal life in forest environments.
• Measurement of humidity, temperature, and biomass of vegetation cover.
• Detection and segmentation of fire, smoke and burned area in wildfire events.
• UAVs in the monitoring of forest environments.
• Multispectral and hyperspectral image sensors and methods for forest analysis.
• Geo-localization and mapping of events and landmarks in forest areas.
• Data acquisition from airborne and spaceborne sensors.
• Public datasets that contain aerial images/videos of forest environments.
• Benchmarking of aerial image/video analysis methods in forest environments.
• 3D reconstruction of forest environment with airborne image, video, LiDAR, Radar.
• Real-time data analysis for early detection and forecasting progression of wildfires.
• Combining large-scale/high latency satellite data with low-scale/low-latency aerial data.

Dr. Alexandre Bernardino
Dr. Alexandra Moutinho
Dr. Catarina Barata
Dr. El Khalil Cherif
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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