Remote Sensing for Land Cover/Land Use Mapping at Local and Regional Scales

Dear Colleagues,

More than ever, there is a need from policy and decision makers, national governments, non-governmental organizations, international initiatives, scientists and individual citizens for timely and accurate spatially-explicit information on Earth’s physical cover of Earth's surface and the socio-economic function of land at multiple scales. Information on land-cover and land-use patterns and monitoring of their changes, can support regional policies and local action for sustainable development in terms of efficiency in resources use, disaster risk reduction, and environmental protection.

Since the process and driving forces of change usually operate at multiple scales, it is important to capture and synthesize information on the land-cover and land-use patterns in regional, wall-to-wall maps, as well as at sub-regional, national, and local scales.

Nowadays, the availability of satellite data with improved characteristics at low or no cost, the technological evolution of Unmanned Aerial Systems in terms of autonomy and payload capacity, the introduction of robust algorithms, and the advent of the data processing and distribution technology, have motivated the progress of research and efforts from the remote-sensing community to cover the information needs on land use/land cover mapping at appropriate scales.

However, several challenges still exist, related, among others, to the development of stable processing approaches, local and regional products with higher spatial and temporal resolutions, as well as improved thematic content, multi-sensor and multi-platform fusion (i.e., UAS-satellite), web-processing services and big data analysis, consistency and harmonization of the information content among existing regional and local products, existing data gaps, and lack of standardized validation procedures.

This Special Issue calls for submissions presenting new conceptual frameworks and novel remote-sensing approaches addressing the abovementioned challenges, new or improved geospatial tools for extracting local and regional land use and land cover information from multiple remote sensing data sources, and sectoral as well as interdisciplinary research.

Review papers presenting the status and progress, as well as remaining challenges, are also welcomed.

Dr. Giorgos Mallinis
Dr. Charalampos Georgiadis
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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