Remote Sensing-Based Digital Soil Mapping of Organic Carbon Stocks
A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Remote Sensing".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 August 2026 | Viewed by 203
Special Issue Editor
Interests: the quality and restoration of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems; soil mapping; remote sensing
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks are a cornerstone of soil health, agricultural resilience, and climate-change mitigation, yet they remain challenging to quantify consistently across landscapes and through time. Field sampling provides essential ground truth but is often spatially sparse, expensive, and difficult to repeat at scale—especially when SOC must be expressed as stocks (e.g., accounting for depth intervals, bulk density, coarse fragments, and uncertainty propagation). Meanwhile, Earth observation offers spatially continuous information on vegetation, surface conditions, moisture, temperature, terrain, and land management proxies that strongly influence SOC distribution. Rapid growth in multisensor remote sensing (optical, hyperspectral, thermal, SAR, LiDAR) and data-driven modelling is creating new opportunities for robust, repeatable SOC stock mapping and monitoring.
This Special Issue aims to advance remote sensing-based digital soil mapping of SOC stocks by showcasing methods, datasets, and applications that integrate in situ soil observations with Earth observation covariates and spatial–temporal modelling. The topic directly matches the scope of Remote Sensing by emphasizing innovative sensing, retrieval, data fusion, and geospatial analytics to map and monitor terrestrial processes and environmental variables (with a focus on soils and the carbon cycle).
Articles may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- EO covariates for SOC stock prediction (vegetation traits/phenology, moisture, temperature, bare-soil signals);
- Hyperspectral/imaging spectroscopy for soil and SOC-related indicators;
- SAR/LiDAR/DEM integration for terrain–hydrology–erosion controls on SOC;
- Multi-source data fusion (satellite–airborne–UAV; EO + climate + land use/management);
- ML/hybrid/physics-informed DSM, transferability, and benchmarking;
- Depth harmonization, bulk density estimation, and stock computation workflows;
- Validation designs (spatial CV), uncertainty quantification, and error propagation;
- Spatiotemporal SOC mapping and change detection;
- MRV and decision-support applications.
Dr. George Zalidis
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- digital soil mapping
- soil organic carbon
- SOC stocks
- carbon accounting
- spatial modelling
- uncertainty quantification
- validation and benchmarking
- MRV
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