Remote Sensing of Soil Properties

Dear Colleagues,

The spatial and temporal variability of soil properties (e.g., particle size distribution, pH, salinity, moisture dynamics, and nutrient availability) are important to understand environmental function and ecosystem services. With the increased availability of remote sensing products and computing resources, detailed characterization of soil properties across time and space is becoming more feasible and important for many applications ranging from earth system models to local land management decision-making toolsets. In many areas of the world, soil mapping products are not available or are not accurate enough to reasonably constrain uncertainty for end-users.

The lack of quality soil property data often proves to be a limiting factor for process-based modeling, particularly in the context of climate change adaptation and changing land uses. In addition to more traditional soil properties (e.g., texture), there is an increasing need for remote sensing applications monitoring more dynamic soil properties, including soil health indicators (e.g., aggregate stability), or soil cover parameters (e.g., biological soil crust cover).

We invite you to contribute a paper to this Special Issue to highlight new methods or sensors to improve characterization of soil properties with remote sensing. This may include new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) approaches, aerial photography, lidar, gamma radiometrics, hyperspectral sensors, satellite imagery archives, or novel new sensors to improve mapping and understanding of soil properties in both space and time. We also invite papers utilizing remote sensing in new predictive workflows for digital soil mapping with a particular focus on improving accuracy for the production of ‘user-ready’ products.

Dr. Travis W. Nauman
Dr. Jonathan J. Maynard
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.