Forest Disturbance Monitoring Using Satellite Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

The world’s forests host about 80% of terrestrial biodiversity and provide a wide range of economic, social and ecological benefits. Today, we observe a growing pressure on forest ecosystems due to climate change, illegal logging and unsustainable forest management. Monitoring forests by satellite remote sensing allows us to detect forest areas under pressure and helps us to better understand the natural and anthropogenic drivers of forest degradation and deforestation.

In the past few years, we have seen considerable progress in the development of forest monitoring applications based on satellite imagery. The large amount of available open data has fostered the technical development of new methods and the roll-out of near-real-time forest monitoring applications using both optical and SAR data. Over the past ten years, many applications have focused on tropical forests. However, due to drought stress and forest health issues in boreal and temperate forests, the monitoring of these forest areas has gained renewed attention.

This Special Issue invites contributions with a focus on the latest research developments and applications in forest disturbance monitoring using satellite data from the tropics to the boreal region. We especially invite submissions that focus on technical advancements in time series analysis and change detection for forest monitoring, but also manuscripts that focus on operational applications. Submissions shall address any of the following topics:

Technical topics:

• Novel methods for time series analysis in forest remote sensing;
• Outlier handling in times series analysis;
• Change detection methods in forest disturbance monitoring;
• AI approaches in forest disturbance monitoring;
• Combination of SAR and optical data streams in forest monitoring applications;
• Methods to separate and classify different forest disturbance agents (biotic and abiotic);
• Operational applications on Earth Observation (EO) platforms.

Thematic topics and applications:

• Near-real-time forest monitoring applications;
• REDD+ applications;
• Disturbance monitoring in different forest and woodland ecosystems (tropical, boreal, temperate forests);
• Mapping of forest degradation and selective logging (< 0.1ha);
• Forest health monitoring (e.g., drought stress, insect infestation, etc.);
• Improved risk modeling (susceptibility to storm damage or bark beetle infestation).

Dr. Janik Deutscher
Dr. Jörg Haarpaintner
Dr. Manuela Hirschmugl
Dr. Johannes Reiche
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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.