Developing Open-Source Remote Sensing Data Products for Economic, Environmental, and Societal Advancements

Scope

The advent of massive Earth observations, with different revisit frequencies and spatial resolutions, has enabled mapping and monitoring land, ocean, and atmosphere properties from regional to global scales. Over past decades, many regional and global products have been developed from satellite observations to support a variety of environmental and climate change studies, such as urbanization, air pollution, land use and land cover change, precision agriculture, water and carbon cycles. These open-source products derived from remote sensing observations are highly needed in various communities, such as urban design and planning, natural resource management, and energy demand/supply modeling. Recently, with the era of new satellite constellations, both spatial and temporal resolutions of satellite observations have been significantly advanced, showing a great potential to support accurate and timely monitoring of changes across the Earth's surface. In addition to products directly derived from satellite observations, modeled data products by using Earth observations as key inputs are emerging from interdisciplinary studies. There is a growing need for useful, unique, and complete open data to support economic, environmental, and societal advancements. 

This special issue invites manuscripts demonstrating state-of-the-art data products relevant to large-scale studies with the use of Earth Observations, particularly at global and regional scales. The key criteria include:

1. Global or regional scales
2. Can be accessed readily
3. Can be updated timely and consistently
4. Significant usefulness, uniqueness, and completeness

Studies of multiple data comparison and review papers are also welcome.

Guest Editors

Yuyu Zhou

Dr. Yuyu Zhou is an associate professor at the Department of Geological & Atmospheric Sciences, Iowa State University. His research interests lie in the applications of geospatial technologies including remote sensing, GIS, geovisualization, spatial analytic tools, and integrated assessment modeling to understanding the issues of urban environmental change and the potential solutions. He has published over 160 papers in leading journals such as Energy & Environmental Science, PNAS, Remote Sensing of Environment, and Global Change Biology. He is the Section Editor of Earth Observations in All Earth, a Topical Editor for Earth System Science Data, and associate editors for Urban Climate and Ecological Processes, and serves on the Editorial Boards of Remote Sensing of Environment.

Ghassem R. Asrar

Dr. Ghassem R. Asrar is an Earth system scientist with a major focus on understanding biosphere-atmosphere interaction using remote sensing. He has published more than 240 scientific and technical papers and books with the h-index of 47, i10-index of 91 and more than 15000 citations. He established several national and international educational and training programs such as the NASA Earth System Science Fellowships and the Young Investigators programs and the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Early Career Scientists program that have trained and supported several thousand students and early career scientists worldwide. He served as chair and a member of numerous national and scientific and technical committees such as the US Global Change Research Program, Group on Global Earth Observing System of Systems, Committee on Earth Observations Satellites, and chief editor and editorial boards of numerous scientific and technical journals.

Xuecao Li

Dr. Xuecao Li is a professor at the College of Land Science and Technology, China Agricultural University. His research interests include interdisciplinary fields related to the urbanization, such as remote sensing, land use /cover change modeling, urban vegetation phenology. He has published over 90 SCI papers in top journals, including Science Bulletin, Earth System Science Data, Remote Sensing of Environment, ISPRS Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. He served as an editor of All Earth, Remote Sensing, and Frontiers of Remote Sensing, and co-chair of sections in American Association of Geographers.

Hao Tang

Dr. Hao Tang is an assistant professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. His work links remote sensing data, mathematic model and ground survey to characterize spatial-temporal changes of 3D vegetation structure and its impact on nature and human society. He is a Science Team Member and Product Lead of NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission. He is also an associate editor for Remote Sensing of Environment.

Qian Shi

Qian Shi is an associate professor with the School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, China. Her research interests include remote sensing image classification, including deep learning, transfer learning. She has published over 50 papers in leading journals such as Remote Sensing of Environment, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. She is the chair of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Guangzhou Chapter. She is the associate editor for IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, and IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing and Remote Sensing.

Submission Instructions

Please indicate in your cover letter that your submission is intended for inclusion in the special issue.

Submission Deadline: September 15, 2023

Table of Contents