Monitoring Agricultural Land-Use Change and Land-Use Intensity
A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "Remote Sensing in Agriculture and Vegetation".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2018) | Viewed by 110422
Special Issue Editors
Interests: copernicus; disaster management; remote sensing image classification; SDG; Sendai; agriculture; time series analysis
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: understanding the drivers of land-use land-cover change (LULCC); remote sensing of LULCC; sustainable land use
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: land use change; crop growth modelling; telecoupling; climate change impact
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: remote sensing of vegetation with focus on time series analysis and use of physically based radiative transfer models for mapping biochemical and biophysical traits
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Globally, agricultural production will need to increase to meet the food demand of the growing population, changing diets, and a rising importance of bioenergy. Agricultural expansion has already led to marked increases in agricultural production, albeit at substantial environmental costs. At the same time, agricultural land abandonment, i.e. the abolishment of cropping and livestock grazing activities, is widespread in many parts of the world.
The potential for further agricultural expansion is limited or would entail high environmental costs. Hence, one solution to mitigate the unavoidable increase of agricultural production is to intensify land-use on already cultivated lands, or the recultivation of abandoned lands. In order to understand the potential for intensification (or recultivation), information on spatial and temporal patterns of agricultural land-use change, land-use intensity, and/or abandonment at multiple geographic scales is required.
However, mapping the proxies of land-use abandonment or intensification, such as multiple annual cropping, intercropping, application of fertilizers, crop rotation techniques, or irrigation of cultivated fields as time-series, would require the development of novel methods. Recently, freeing satellite remote sensing data archives and the establishment of freely accessible satellite data programs, such as the European earth observation program Copernicus, makes it attractive to utilize the synergy of different sensors and data fusion techniques to address the societal needs to map land-use and its intensity.
This Special Issue on Monitoring Agricultural Land-Use Change and Land-Use Intensity will draw from ongoing advancements and novel developments in earth observation methodologies to assess agricultural land-use intensity and land-use change, with special emphasis on “big remotely-sensed data” analysis, data fusion techniques, time-series analysis, etc. We specifically encourage the submission of studies on the mapping of grazing patterns in grassland ecosystems and land abandonment. Papers that address the integration of remote sensing, and both the biophysical and human dimensions of agricultural land-use and land-use change, are also encouraged.
With these issues in mind, we invite you to submit methodological and applied studies, as well as review papers, with respect to, but not limited to, the following topics:
- Assessment of spatial and temporal patterns of cropland expansion/contraction—abandonment and intensification/de-intensification;
- Assessment of spatial and temporal patterns of grazing;
- Data fusion techniques (SAR, LiDAR, optical remote sensing products) and analysis of big remotely-sensed data analysis for agricultural intensity and change studies;
- Interdisciplinary studies on the utilization of remote sensing to map agricultural land-use change and linkage with socio-economic, biodiversity, and ecosystem processes.
Dr. Fabian Löw
Prof. Dr. Alexander Prishchepov
Dr. Florian Schierhorn
Prof. Dr. Clement Atzberger
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- land-use change
- land-use intensity
- intensification and de-intensification
- farm- and cropland abandonment
- drivers of land-use change and abandonment
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