SAR for Forest Mapping

Dear Colleagues,

As a vital natural resource, forests are of extreme importance for all living beings on our planet. They play a key role in controlling climate change, represent an essential source of energy (such as biomass), food, jobs, and livelihoods, and serve as natural habitat to a large variety of animal species, which is essential for biodiversity preservation.

Forest ecosystems are constantly shaped and changed by physical and biological disturbances and eventual regeneration processes. Today, forest degradation is occurring at an alarming rate, often due to illegal anthropogenic activities, such as logging and fires, so that sensitive environments have been irreversibly damaged, with critical environmental and economic consequences at regional as well as at global scale. A precise and efficient assessment and monitoring of the forests resources, treatments, and recreational opportunities is therefore of crucial importance in order to develop early warning systems. In this scenario, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing represents a unique technique for providing high-resolution images independently of daylight and almost any weather conditions. In the last few decades, SAR imaging has demonstrated its suitability for forest mapping applications. The combination of the polarimetric, interferometric, and/or tomographic information further increases its capabilities and the achievable product accuracy.

As Guest Editors, we would like to dedicate this Special Issue to documenting SAR-based methods for forest mapping. Well-prepared, unpublished submissions that address one or more of the following topics are solicited:

• New methods and concepts for the quantitative assessment of forest biomass;
• Combination of complementary SAR imaging methods (tomography, polarimetry, interferometry) to define novel approaches, concepts, and applications for forest mapping and monitoring;
• Feasibility studies with new sensors, ranging from drones to spaceborne SAR systems, and their applications to forestry;
• Combined use of multifrequency SAR imaging for forest applications;
• Comparison and benchmarking studies using various sensors and/or processing methods for forestry;
• New approaches for the detection of forest changes;
• Potentials of artificial intelligence-based methods for forest information retrieval;
• Novel methodologies considering the fusion of SAR data with data from other sources.

Mr. Michele Martone
Dr. Armando Marino
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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