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

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 the physical cover of the Earth's surface, as well as the socio-economic function of land at multiple scales. Information on land-cover and land-use patterns and the 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.

As the processes 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 in order to cover the information needs for land-use/land-cover mapping at appropriate scales.

However, several challenges still exist, related, among others, to the development of stable processing approaches, and 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 above-mentioned 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 and interdisciplinary research.

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

Dr. Giorgios Mallinis
Dr. Charalampos Georgiadis
Guest Editors

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