Remote Sensing of Global Environmental Change’s Impacts on Ecosystem Resilience
A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "Biogeosciences Remote Sensing".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 February 2026 | Viewed by 6
Special Issue Editors
Interests: vegetation disturbances; resistance, resilience, and tipping points; natural disasters; land use/cover change; remote sensing big data; multi-source remote sensing data fusion; terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle; global environmental change
Interests: biophysical remote sensing; terrestrial ecohydrology; land surface phenology; carbon and water fluxes; geostationary and low-Earth observations; time series analyses; climate change impacts; vegetation health and ecosystem resilience; ecological forecasting
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: resilience; soil carbon; drought; plant water stress; tropical forests
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Global environmental change, driven by climate change, land use alterations, pollution, and invasive species, poses unprecedented challenges to ecosystems worldwide. Understanding and monitoring the impacts of these changes on ecosystem resilience—the capacity of ecosystems to resist and recover from disturbances, e.g., absorb the impacts from disturbances, reorganize, and maintain essential functions and structures—is critical for effective conservation, management, and sustainable development.
Remote sensing technologies provide indispensable, synoptic, and repeatable observations across vast spatial and temporal scales, making them uniquely powerful tools for detecting, quantifying, and predicting the impacts of global change drivers on ecosystem resilience. From satellite constellations offering global coverage to airborne and UAV-mounted sensors capturing high-resolution detail, remote sensing enables the tracking of key resilience indicators, disturbance responses, and recovery trajectories.
This Special Issue aims to showcase cutting-edge research leveraging the full spectrum of remote sensing data (e.g., optical, LiDAR, radar, thermal, and hyperspectral data) and analytical techniques (e.g., time series analysis, machine learning, data fusion) to advance our understanding of the impacts of global environmental change on ecosystem resilience. We welcome the submission of studies across diverse biomes (forest, grassland, wetland, coastal, arid, urban, aquatic) and scales, addressing fundamental questions about how ecosystems resist, respond to, and recover from chronic pressures and acute disturbances.
Articles may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Resilience Indicators: Spectral/structural traits as stability proxies;
- Climate Impacts: The effects of drought, heatwaves, and sea level rise;
- Disturbance Detection: The detection of fires, pests, storms, and deforestation;
- Recovery Monitoring: Post-disturbance dynamics tracking;
- Land Use Impacts: Fragmentation, urbanization, and habitat loss;
- Links with Biodiversity: Linking the spectral, structural, or functional diversity to resilience metrics;
- Ecosystem Services: The carbon/water flux resilience;
- Early Warning Systems: Tipping point prediction;
- Multi-Sensor Fusion: SAR+optical and LiDAR+hyperspectral synergy;
- Cross-Biome Models: Resilience comparisons (forests/grasslands/wetlands).
We invite the submission of original research articles, reviews, and methodological papers that demonstrate innovative applications of remote sensing to illuminate the complex interplay between global change drivers and ecosystem resilience, ultimately contributing to more informed stewardship of our planet's vital ecosystems.
Dr. Yuchao Yan
Prof. Dr. Alfredo Huete
Guest Editors
Dr. Huan Wang
Guest Editor Assistant
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.
Keywords
- ecosystem resilience
- global change
- remote sensing
- disturbance detection
- recovery monitoring
- multi-sensor fusion
- time series analysis
- carbon sequestration
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