Computer Vision-Based Monitoring of Aquatic Ecosystems Across Marine and Freshwater Environments

Dear Colleagues,

Aquatic ecosystems, including oceans, lakes, rivers, and coastal waters, play a critical role in global biodiversity, food security, and ecosystem services. However, effective monitoring and management of aquatic organisms remain challenging due to complex environments, limited accessibility, and high monitoring costs. Recent advances in computer vision and artificial intelligence, combined with multi-platform remote sensing technologies, offer new opportunities for scalable, cost-effective, and high-resolution ecological monitoring across diverse water bodies.

This Special Issue aims to highlight state-of-the-art computer vision applications for monitoring aquatic organisms across the hydrosphere, including marine, freshwater, and transitional water environments. We particularly focus on vision-based analysis of aquatic animals, aquatic plants, benthic organisms, and habitat structures using advanced methods such as object detection, semantic and instance segmentation, image enhancement, and multimodal data fusion. These techniques enable accurate species detection, abundance estimation, behavior analysis, habitat mapping, and long-term ecological assessment.

The Special Issue welcomes studies leveraging diverse data sources, including underwater imagery, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), manned aircraft, and satellite observations. Contributions may address methodological innovations, system development, field applications, and integrated monitoring frameworks that support sustainable aquatic resource management, biodiversity conservation, and environmental assessment. By bridging computer vision, remote sensing, and aquatic ecology, this Special Issue seeks to advance intelligent monitoring solutions that enhance our ability to observe, understand, and sustainably manage aquatic ecosystems under increasing environmental pressures.

Dr. Fan Zhao
Dr. Jiaqi Wang
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. Water 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 2600 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.