Global Biospheric Monitoring with Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

The biosphere as the interface between lithosphere and atmosphere modulates most of the Earth processes, enabling the cycling of energy, water, and chemical elements. As the living part of the Earth, it maintains a delicate equilibrium, highly dependent on climate dynamics and anthropic impacts. On a yearly basis, the biosphere is always changing in response to annual climate variation; in addition, large-scale climatic variability can have a strong impact on biosphere functioning at longer time scales.

The role of the biosphere on the functioning of biogeochemical cycles results in substantial local or regional alterations that can impact the conditions of the entire planet, including the climate. In addition, climate change occurring at a global scale has an effect on atmosphere–land surface interactions in all regions of the planet.

Already hundreds of years ago geographers and naturalists were exploring the Earth trying to discover the underlying processes that drive biosphere functioning and structure. Important findings were made when these scientists gathered and analyzed huge amounts of local information, during long trips along the hemispheres. Nowadays, our biosphere and landscapes are so fragmented that it would be difficult to derive general patterns from local observations.

Anthropogenic impacts interplay with natural gradients providing a high level of complexity to biosphere functioning. Thus, monitoring must be framed both in the spatial and temporal dimensions in order to assess the spatial distribution of the biosphere temporal patterns and the temporal characteristics of the biosphere spatial patterns.

At present, technical advances enable the exploration and monitoring of the biosphere. Remote sensing is potentially the most powerful tool to explore the Earth, making it possible to assess biosphere dynamics at several scales. More recently increases in computing capabilities have opened new possibilities to manage and analyze the large amounts of land surface information acquired by satellites.

This Special Issue intends to disseminate advanced research on biosphere monitoring based on remote sensing data at the regional and global scales. It represents an opportunity to bring together new methodologies/paradigms to advance efficient biosphere monitoring. All topics related to biosphere functioning are considered, for example, biodiversity, phenology, land use change, burning dynamics, energy balance, and soil resources. We are inviting papers including, but not limited to the following research lines:

• Assessing patterns of biosphere dynamics at short, medium, and long terms such as early warning methodologies and identification of anomalies and trends among others.
• Assessing the impact of climate change and anthropogenic drivers on the biosphere.
• Assessing the impact of vegetation dynamics and land use change on climatic patterns.
• Developing forecasting models for biosphere dynamics
• Developing and use of novel spectral indexes to better understand biosphere functioning.

Dr. Alicia Palacios-Orueta
Dr. Xiaolu Tang
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.