Advances in Urban Remote Sensing Monitoring and Coupling with GIS

Dear Colleagues,

Urbanization remains a global trend, with urban land use being a critical component of this process. Urban remote sensing has become a vital tool for urban management and achieving high-quality urban development due to its unique advantages. By analyzing remote sensing imagery, urban remote sensing acquires geographic information of cities and their surrounding areas, enabling dynamic monitoring and management of urban development. Current research in this field focuses on urban land use/cover mapping and dynamic monitoring, urban environmental and ecological monitoring, socio-economic development analysis and parameter estimation, urban infrastructure and transportation management, as well as urban disaster monitoring and emergency response. These studies hold significant value for urban planning, environmental protection, and disaster emergency management.

GIS technology is inherently intertwined with these research efforts, providing a unified platform that integrates multi-source, multi-temporal, and multi-scale remote sensing imagery with various geospatial data (vector, attribute, topographic, and socio-economic data) through precise registration and integrated management. This constructs a "digital base" for cities, enabling all analyses to be conducted under a unified geographic reference and laying the data foundation for comprehensive decision-making.

However, current urban remote sensing research still faces a series of challenges and issues in technology and data, methods and models, application and integration, as well as social and ethical dimensions. These include the heterogeneity and mixed pixel problems in complex urban scenes, the poor universality and transferability of deep learning models, and the disconnection from practical urban planning and management operations.

Therefore, this Special Issue, titled "Advances in Urban Remote Sensing Monitoring and Coupling with GIS," aims to present cutting-edge research on urban remote sensing monitoring, striving to find solutions to challenges such as surging data volumes, increasingly complex technological demands, and the widespread application of multi-source data fusion.

We welcome submissions of original research or review articles related to "urban remote sensing" or "urban ecological environment monitoring". Research areas may include (but not limited to) the following:

• Applications of deep learning models for automatic and accurate target identification in complex urban scenes;
• Dynamic monitoring of urban processes and anomaly detection using time-series data;
• Heterogeneity and mixed pixel issues in complex urban scenes;
• Processing of massive urban remote sensing data and computational challenges;
• Exploring feasible pathways to closely integrate remote sensing research outcomes with urban planning and management practices;
• 3D urban modeling and digital twins;
• Virtual geographic environment;
• Applications of coupled remote sensing and GIS technologies in urban development monitoring;
• Breakthroughs in technical bottlenecks for urban remote sensing data acquisition and processing;
• Standardization and interoperability of multi-source data fusion;
• Interdisciplinary and collaborative innovation between urban remote sensing and other fields;
• Social and ethical issues encountered in the development of urban remote sensing.

I look forward to receiving your valuable contributions.

Dr. Yusuyunjiang Mamitimin
Dr. Baozhong He
Dr. Ilyas Nurmemet
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-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Urban Science is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 1800 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.

• urban remote sensing monitoring
• urban change processes
• geographical information systems (GIS)
• multi-source data fusion
• smart remote sensing