Remote Sensing for Biodiversity Mapping and Monitoring

Dear Colleagues,

Biodiversity is facing dramatic erosion and increasing pressure caused by anthropogenic activities intensifying in magnitude and extent. This leads to strong transformations impacting ecosystems globally, including changes in taxonomic diversity, as well as structure and functions at plant and ecosystem scales. These transformations need to be observed, assessed, and reported with dedicated monitoring programs in order to build efficient actions to mitigate or reverse them. Such monitoring programs need to rely on remote sensing (RS) data, as they potentially provide spatially explicit information from the Earth’s surface at regional to global scale, with regular revisit time, and collect information particularly relevant for the monitoring of vegetated surfaces. Such information is crucial to understanding how biodiversity responds to global environmental changes and directs human activity.

This Special Issue aims to publish original research that specifically addresses various aspects of biodiversity mapping and monitoring over space and time using remote sensing from local to global scales. We invite a wide range of contributions from methodological to applied and multidisciplinary research about the following (non-exclusive) topics:

• Taxonomic, structural, and functional diversity mapping from RS data;
• Species distribution modeling based on RS data;
• Retrieving biophysical and biochemical variables from RS data and radiative transfer models;
• Assessing and predicting ecosystem services from RS data;
• Ecosystems health monitoring from RS data;
• Reconstructing ecosystem trajectories over time from RS data;
• Advanced machine learning techniques (deep learning, transfer learning, active learning) for biodiversity mapping based on RS data;
• Fusion of multimodal images (optical/thermal/radar/lidar) to improve biodiversity mapping and monitoring.

Reviews covering one or more topics are welcome.
We encourage the authors to make their sample data and computational tools publicly available through online resources to ensure the reproducibility and transparency of all the experiments.

Dr. David Sheeren
Dr. Jean-Baptiste Féret
Dr. Laurence Hubert-Moy
Dr. Sophie Fabre
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-anonymized 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.