Remote Sensing of Evapotranspiration and Water Stress of Woody Perennial Crops in Water-Limited Regions

Dear Colleagues,

Woody perennial crops, such as grape vines and various orchard crops, represent an economically important fraction of agricultural production in the US and around the world. Irrigation scheduling is often seen as the single most important tool for the management of both yield and quality in the production of these crops, but the combined effects of global climate change and growing demands for water have begun to threaten the long-term viability of continued production levels in some regions. Timely knowledge of evapotranspiration (ET) rates and plant water stress status can be very useful in irrigation scheduling decisions, but the use of remote sensing (RS) technologies for the accurate estimation of these factors for most woody perennial crops is difficult for various scientific and technical reasons. We lack a sufficient understanding of such things as the effects of inconsistencies in the spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution of different types of sensors that prove difficult to resolve; how to accurately separate crop canopy from interrow ET, especially for ET models based on coarse-resolution satellite imagery; how to accurately account for differences in cultivars, irrigation methods, and plant management technologies in modeling ET and ET components; the relationship of crop canopy ET to stress conditions; and the effects of the formation and evolution of atmospheric boundary layers—especially at the edges of large irrigated crop production areas—on diurnal ET rates and biophysical processes.  This Special Issue will address these and other scientific challenges for the use of RS technologies in ET estimation for agricultural water management.

Dr. Mac McKee
Dr. Joseph G. Alfieri
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.