Advances in Remote Sensing Systems for Disaster Management and Risk Mitigation

Dear Colleagues,

Natural and man-made hazards have increasingly affected communities worldwide in recent decades. Some of these hazard events are likely to further increase in frequency and/or magnitude due to climate change. Moreover, hazards may also occur concurrently or sequentially in time and space, generating cascading and/or compounding events that are potentially more dangerous than single hazard events.

Although it seems clear that the management of these disasters cannot be given exclusively in emergency phases, efforts are still required to implement sustainable disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies allowing for an increased level of preparedness for response and recovery and, thus, the capacity for resilience of at least those areas most prone to natural disasters.

The relevance of DRR in achieving sustainable development as well as the roadmap to reducing the impacts on human lives and the economy has been highlighted by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, which explicitly promotes the use of space-based technologies as a suitable way to gather data needed to elaborate information on hazard exposure, vulnerability, and risk and, hence, as an indispensable source of information to support decision-making related to disasters.

In this regard, Earth observation (EO) technologies have been widely integrated within disaster risk management systems in recent years, thanks to the growing availability of data/products of high quality and accuracy, as well as of advanced systems for their analysis/development, allowing the assessment of hazards and risk at multiple scales ranging from global to community levels.

Focusing on EO remote sensing systems, in the present Special Issue, we welcome all publications related to the innovative use of recent technologies, sensors/data, algorithms, and strategies supporting disaster risk management in one or more phases of its cycle (including disaster preparation, response, recovery, and mitigation).

In particular, submissions are encouraged which cover a wide range of subjects related to disaster phenomena, vulnerability, and risk studies, which may include but are not limited to the following topics:

• Natural hazards (flood, fires, earthquake, volcano, drought, etc.) detection and monitoring;
• Man-made hazards (oil spills, gas flares, fracking, etc.) detection and monitoring;
• Development of multihazard systems and examples of implementation/contribution to risk reduction;
• Relevant examples on the use of optical, thermal, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite remote systems to develop early warning systems at local to global scales;
• Definition of innovative approaches and new algorithms for the analysis of remotely sensed data aimed to rapidly map and monitor large areas as indispensable sources of information to support decision-making related to disaster management;
• Development of novel software applications, technologies, and tools to support disaster risk management and possible definition and validation of models for evaluation of risk and its reduction;
• Case studies demonstrating the use of satellite data collected by active and passive sensors in support of risk management;
• Statistical analyses of long-term time series of remotely sensed ground- (e.g., GPS) and satellite-based data devoted to estimating the informative contribution of different observables for increasing our capabilities to provide natural hazard assessment at different time scales.

 

Dr. Mariano Lisi
Dr. Katsumi Hattori
Dr. Nicola Genzano
Dr. Rossana Paciello
Dr. Teodosio Lacava
Guest Editor

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.