Monitoring Surface Water Dynamics and Quality Using Modern Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

Surface water bodies—including rivers, lakes, reservoirs, wetlands, coasts, and oceans—play a fundamental role in sustaining ecosystems, supporting human societies, and regulating the Earth’s climate system. However, these environments face growing pressures from climate change, population growth, industrialization, and intensified land–sea interactions. Monitoring both the dynamics and quality of surface waters, across inland and marine environments, is therefore critical for water resource management, ecological health, disaster risk reduction, and sustainable development.

Modern remote sensing technologies are revolutionizing how we observe surface waters at multiple scales. Satellite, airborne, and UAV-based platforms equipped with multispectral, hyperspectral, thermal, SAR, and LiDAR sensors now provide unprecedented capabilities to monitor spatial–temporal variability and water quality indicators such as turbidity, chlorophyll, harmful algal blooms, suspended sediments, salinity, temperature, and nutrients. Meanwhile, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing enable more accurate retrievals, automated mapping, and near-real-time applications that bridge science and decision-making.

For this Special Issue, we invite contributions that advance the monitoring and understanding of surface water dynamics and quality in both inland and oceanic systems using modern remote sensing approaches. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Remote sensing of inland and ocean surface water extent, dynamics, and variability;
• Monitoring water quality indicators: turbidity, chlorophyll, algal blooms, sediments, salinity, temperature, nutrients;
• Integration of multi-source observations (satellite, UAV, airborne, in situ) for water studies;
• AI, machine learning, and cloud-based methods for water monitoring and forecasting;
• Applications in flood, drought, water resource, and coastal management;
• Advances in SAR, hyperspectral, LiDAR, and thermal sensing of aquatic environments;
• Long-term monitoring of climate change and anthropogenic impacts on inland and ocean waters;
• Case studies and applications in lakes, rivers, reservoirs, wetlands, coastal, and marine systems.

We welcome submissions of original research, reviews, case studies, methodological papers, and short communications.

Dr. Sensen Wu
Prof. Dr. Hua Su
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. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2700 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.