Topical Collection "Feature Papers for Section Environmental Remote Sensing"
A topical collection in Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This collection belongs to the section "Environmental Remote Sensing".
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Interests: hydrogeology; geomorphology; natural hazards; land use/cover changes; optical/radar remote sensing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Topical Collection Information
Dear Colleagues,
Growing concerns about the human impact on the environment has led to the development of new observation and analysis tools to tackle and monitor the types, magnitudes, and rates of environmental changes. Timely observations by Earth observation (EO) satellite systems, and improved mapping and analysis tools are enabling a better understanding of the ecological and environmental interactions that underlie our Earth systems, which is critical for developing sustainable solutions. The section on environmental remote sensing deals with emerging methods, technologies, and high-impact EO applications in real-world contexts. It may include sensors such as a synthetic aperture radar for coastal subsidence monitoring, UAV-based disaster damage and recovery assessment, high resolution multispectral data for ecosystem vulnerability and rehabilitation assessment, or hyperspectral data for biodiversity mapping and analysis. Topics may cover a broad range of environments, from coastal to forest and desert areas, as well as applications, for example, conservation management, land conversion, natural resources mapping, and ecosystem dynamics. The focus of this Special Issue is on environmental issues in light of climate change and human impacts. Manuscripts for this important Special Issue of Remote Sensing will be accepted by the editorial office, the Editor-in-Chief and editorial board members by invitation only.
- Ecosystem assessment and monitoring;
- Land-use/-cover changes (LUCC);
- Arid land geomorphology;
- Water resources assessment;
- Wetland and coastal dynamics;
- Geohazards;
- Land subsidence;
- Subsurface investigation;
- Time-series analysis;
- Data fusion and assimilation;
- Synergy of optical and radar;
- New sensors/platforms applications
Dr. Magaly Koch
Collection Editor
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 collection website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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 2500 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.
Planned Papers
The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.
1. Title: UAV based radar imaging: state of art and perspectives
author list: Francesco Soldovieri and Ilaria Catapano
abstract: In recent years Unmanned Aircraft Veichles (UAV) have proven their value in a wide variety of applications. Besides being used in several military applications, UAV are already becoming mainstream tools for addressing many civil missions such as, hurricane and polar ice cap monitoring, forest fire detection, natural disasters response, aerial photography, crop dusting, package delivery, and pipeline and powerline monitoring. On the other hand, unleashing the full potential of micro-UAV formations requires augmenting the sensing capability beyond the realm of active/passive optical sensors and daylight/infrared cameras. In this frame, radar systems are attracting attention since they may perform missions in all-weather and day/night conditions and, thanks to the microwave ability to penetrate materials, allow detection and localization not only of surface objects but also of sub-surface/hidden targets. The paper aims at reviewing the state of art technological solutions proposed in the frame of UAV based radar Imaging and discuss about the still open issues regarding or hardware constrains and software requirements as well as guidance and navigation control procedures, with the final goal to provide reliable, accurate and high-resolution images of the observed scene in real applications.
2. Title: PanScale Structural Imaging of Forest: from electron to landscape
author list: Morgan Crowley
abstract: A broad range of environmental scientists and engineers focus their research and development around structural imaging of materials, structures, and devices. These images are employed to determine a wide range of characteristics including structural geometry, material properties, and condition (e.g., health, damage), to name a few. However, while all scientists and engineers tend to use structural imaging for essentially the same environmental applications, there tends to be a fissure within the techniques employed by scientific communities. On one side, communities such as remote sensing scientists and ecologists focus on the macro- and meso-length scales and employ techniques such as satellite and UAV imagery. On the other side, communities such as material scientists and biologists focus on the micro- and nano-length scales and employ techniques such as optical and electron microscopy. While there is certainly overlap in the techniques employed, research that attempts to bridge the span from the macro-length scale (i.e., 103 + m) all the way to the nano-scale (i.e., 10-9 m) is severely lacking. Therefore, in this review we propose a novel conceptual framework for research that employs or focuses on structural imaging: PanScale Structural Imaging. This framework will describe the symbiotic relationship with which structural imaging techniques can be employed to research, spanning from the highest field of view currently available (satellite imagery) to the lowest field of view currently available (transmission electron microscopy). To frame this discussion, we will focus this review on structural imaging of forests.
3. Title: Status of phenological research using Sentinel-2 data: A review
author list: Gourav Misra1,2,3, Fiona Cawkwell2,3, Astrid Wingler1,3
affiliation: 1 School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University College Cork, Ireland.
2 Department of Geography, University College Cork, Ireland.
3 Environmental Research Institute, University College Cork, Ireland
abstract: Remote sensing of plant phenology as an indicator of climate change and for mapping land cover has received significant scientific interest in the past two decades. The advancing of spring events, the lengthening of the growing season, the shifting of tree lines, the decreasing sensitivity to warming and the uniformity of spring across elevations are few of the important remote sensing based evidences of trends in plant phenology. In fact, the number of articles published annually on the topic has more than doubled in the last decade (source: Scopus database). The Sentinel-2A satellite launched in June 2015 and 2B launched in March 2017 with their high temporal frequency and spatial resolution for improved land mapping missions have contributed significantly to knowledge on vegetation over the last three years. However, in spite of the additional red-edge and SWIR bands available on the Sentinel-2 multispectral instruments, with improved vegetation species detection capabilities (Immitzer et al., 2016), there has been very little research on their efficacy to track vegetation cover and its phenology. For example, out of approximately every five papers that analyses NDVI or EVI derived from Sentinel-2 imagery, only one mentions either SWIR or the red-edge bands
(source: Scopus database). Despite the short duration that the Sentinel-2 platforms have been operational, they have proved their potential in a wide range of phenological studies of crops, forests and natural grasslands, and in particular fusion of the data with that from other sensors e.g. Sentinel-1, Landsat and MODIS (d’Andrimont et al., 2020; Pastick et al., 2018; Vrieling et al., 2018). This review paper will discuss the current state of vegetation phenology studies based on the first five years of Sentinel-2, their advantages, limitations and the scope for improvements.