Remote Sensing of Tropical Montane Ecosystems and Elevation Gradients

This Special Issue focuses on patterns, applications, conservation, and remote sensing methods related to tropical montane ecosystems and elevation gradients.

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to join us in developing a Special Issue dedicated to remote sensing of tropical montane ecosystems and elevation gradients. Tropical mountain environments are undergoing significant changes in climate, land-use, biogeochemistry, and water resources. Moreover, they support large human populations, are the headwaters for important rivers, and are biodiversity hotspots.

Remote sensing is crucial to monitoring and understanding tropical mountain systems, but these landscapes pose unique challenges. Steep topography affects remote sensing responses, and clouds are persistent. Climate stations, stream gauges, forest inventories, and other environmental samples are sparse relative to the steep environmental gradients. Natural vegetation is easy to confuse with managed or grazed lands in remotely sensed data.

Examples of research topics for this Special Issue on montane tropical ecosystems and elevation gradients include but are not limited to applications on the following topics:

• Remote sensing of tropical montane ecosystems
  • Characterizing elevation gradients (e.g., vegetation traits, nutrient cycles)
  • Characterizing other gradients in species composition, diversity, or distribution
  • Quantifying and mapping aboveground biomass
  • Mapping other aspects of ecosystem structure, distribution, processes, and services
  • Characterizing fog, clouds, cloud base heights, temperature, rainfall
  • Using remotely sensed land-cover data to scope ecosystem restoration and recovery

• Remote sensing and change in tropical montane landscapes
  • Land-use and land-cover change in tropical montane forests, grasslands, and shrublands (e.g., afforestation, deforestation, woody encroachment, grazing, etc.)
  • Effects of land use on mountain landscapes
  • Changes in snow, ice, surface waters, wetlands, fog, and clouds
  • Thermophilization and other changes in species or ecosystem distributions
  • Changes due to earth movement, hurricanes, typhoons, and fire

• Methods and challenges in tropical montane environments
  • Accounting for topography in remote sensing and mapping, for example, with topographic correction, including change detection and mapping of environmental gradients
  • Inventory and sample design and intensification
  • Cloud screening and addressing the lack of cloud-free imagery
  • Airborne laser scanning for modelling forest structural heterogeneity

Dr. Eileen H. Helmer
Prof. Patrick J. Comer
Dr. David Gwenzi
Dr. Wan Shafrina Wan Mohd Jaafar
Dr. Xiaolin Zhu
Guest Editors

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.