Dear Colleagues,
Forests play a vital role in maintaining the Earth’s ecological balance and environmental health due to their promoting role in the global carbon cycle, water resources quality, and recreation potential. Therefore, changes in forest cover are now a matter of global concern, and a tremendous amount of resources have been invested in stimulating developing technologies for accurate monitoring and estimating the current status of forest resources on several spatial scales.
Remote sensing is particularly useful for this matter because it brings together a multitude of tools to better analyze the scope and scale of forest status that could be studied broadly and uniformly across time and space. Over the last few decades, the global and regional scale of temporal remote sensed data has become available for monitoring the changes in forest cover; supporting forest inventories; and taking a closer look into forest ecophysiology, biophysics and biochemistry.
This Special Issue will focus on state-of-the-art research that specifically addresses various aspects of using remote sensing for estimating and monitoring forest health and, in particular, changes in forest cover, biophysics, and biochemistry.
We are inviting papers including but not limited to the following research topics:
- Remote sensing methods to measure vegetation biophysical parameters;
- Methods for the retrieval of canopy biophysical (e.g., leaf area index, fractional vegetation cover, fAPAR, and plant height) and biochemical (e.g., leaf/canopy chlorophyll and water content and fuel moisture contents) parameters from satellite and airborne sensors;
- Methods to estimate forest canopy status and condition (e.g., forest disturbance, degradation and regrowth);
- Early stress detection;
- Assimilation of biophysical parameters derived from remote sensing for forestry applications and forest management.
Dr. Michael Sprintsin
Guest Editor
https://www.mdpi.com/si/remotesensing/Forest_Change