Theory, Model, Technology, and Application of Remote Sensing in Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

Ongoing climate change has induced a series of crises and challenges that are greatly threatening human well-being and natural ecosystem health. The warming, drought, and extreme climatic events can exert strong impacts on food production, human health, environmental safety, and social development. Increasing evidence also suggests that climate changes are responsible for declined biodiversity, intensified disturbance regimes, degraded ecosystem resilience, and decreased ecosystem services. Numerous 'climate-related events' such as floods, storms, landslides, extreme temperatures (like heat waves or freezes), and wildfires adversely impact human society and terrestrial ecosystems remarkably. For aquatic ecosystems, issues such as saltwater intrusion, sea-level rise, damage from coastal storms, wetland degradation, and lake eutrophication are also widely reported globally. Therefore, a timely and continuously monitoring of land-surface changes and internal shifts within ecosystems is of great significance to maintaining the sustainable development of human beings.

 Benefitting from the well-known advantages and newly achieved progress, remote sensing is becoming the primary pathway to obtain ancillary information aiming to aid decision-making in the fields of natural resource management, natural hazards mitigation, environmental protection, and the success of sustainable development goals. State-of-the-art sensor technology, communication technology, and computer technology have promoted the development of remote sensing technology, while numerous satellite-based, airborne-based, UAV-based, and ground-based sensors have acquired massive data on earth observation.  At present, how to accurately perceive the dynamic information from the massive remote sensing data to support the sustainable development of human society is a challenging subject.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Current and future of the Earth Observation System (EOS) and missions
• Innovation Earth observation sensors, platform, concepts, and techniques
• Theory, model, technology, and application of Earth observation
• Artificial intelligence in Earth observation
• Long-time spatial and temporal analysis of surface, environment and ecological parameters using remote sensing technology
• Rapid parameters estimation and mapping using the cloud-computing platforms (e.g., Google Earth Engine, PIE-Engine, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure)
• Processing of remote sensing images (including but not limited to quality improvement, registration, and fusion)
• Health monitoring of marine, terrestrial, and aquatic ecosystems
• Scientific management of space resources and restoration of ecological environment
• Other related topics

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Chao Chen
Prof. Dr. Jinsong Chen
Prof. Dr. Juhua Luo
Prof. Dr. Lei Fang
Guest Editors

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