Table of Contents

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Camera (MoRIC) onboard the orbiter of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars mission aims to map the surface of Mars globally and to explore its topography and geomorphology. This camera’s wide field of view can be used to overlap adjacent ...

To improve the simulation accuracy of vegetation canopy reflectance in optical bands, the Radiosity Applicable to Porous IndiviDual objects (RAPID) model has been upgraded to better deal with branches in the latest RAPID4. Previous versions of RAPID (...

The bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) of the land surface contains information relating to its physical structure and composition. Accurate BRDF modeling for heterogeneous pixels is important for global ecosystem monitoring and ...

Radiative transfer (RT) simulation based on reconstructed 3-dimensional (3D) vegetation scenarios can promote the validation and development of various retrieval algorithms to monitor the growing states of vegetation in large-scale, multi-angular, and ...

Floods have become increasingly prominent in recent decades causing devastating effects on lives and livelihoods worldwide. Efficient tools to assess the drivers of floods, such as increasing urbanization, could help to minimize flood hazards. ...

Salt marshes are one of the world's most valuable and vulnerable ecosystems. The accurate and timely monitoring of the distribution and composition of salt marsh vegetation is crucial. With the increasing number of archived multi-source images, the time-...

Aerosol particle size has a crucial impact on the environment and public health. Current satellite-based regression models focus on the total amount of particles and are limited by surface observations. This study proposes an algorithm to derive the long-...

Recently, deep learning methods have been widely used in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification and achieved good performance. However, the performance of these methods may be limited because of the scarcity of labeled samples in HSI data. To solve the ...

The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2016 products show that, between 2001 and 2016, nearly half of the land cover change in the conterminous United States (CONUS) involved forested areas. To ensure the quality of NLCD land cover and land cover change ...

Generating canopy-reflectance datasets using radiative transfer models under various leaf and soil optical property combinations is important for remote sensing retrieval of vegetation parameters. One-dimensional radiative transfer models have been ...

National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2019 is a new epoch of national land cover products for the conterminous United States. Image quality is fundamental to the quality of any land cover product. Image preprocessing has often taken a considerable ...

Over the past 2 to 3 decades, Chinese forests are estimated to act as a large carbon sink, yet the magnitude and spatial patterns of this sink differ considerably among studies. Using 3 microwave (L- and X-band vegetation optical depth [VOD]) and 3 ...

Earth Map (https://earthmap.org/) is an innovative and free application developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that was designed in the framework of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations–Google ...

The purpose of pansharpening is to generate high-resolution multispectral (MS) images using both low-resolution MS images and high-resolution panchromatic images. Traditional remote sensing image fusion algorithms can be simplified to a unified detail ...

Canopy structural complexity is a critical emergent forest attribute, and light detection and ranging (lidar)-based fractal dimension has been recognized as its powerful measure at the individual tree level. However, the current lidar-based estimation ...

Reforestation is an eco-friendly strategy for countering rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and the negative effects of forest loss and degradation. China, with one of the world’s most considerable afforestation rates, has increased ...

One-third of the Earth’s land surface experiences seasonal freezing and thawing. Freezing-thawing transitions strongly impact land-atmosphere interactions and, thus, also the lower atmosphere above such areas. Observations of two L-band satellites, the ...

Tree growth is an important indicator of forest health and can reflect changes in forest structure. Traditional tree growth estimates use easy-to-measure parameters, including tree height, diameter at breast height, and crown diameter, obtained via forest ...

The importance of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) to monitoring vegetation photosynthesis has attracted much attention from the ecological and remote sensing research communities. Space-borne SIF products have been obtained owing to the rapid ...

As the second largest producer of maize, China contributes 23% of global maize production and plays an important role in guaranteeing maize markets stability. In spite of its importance, there is no 30 m spatial resolution distribution map of maize for ...

Urbanization affects vegetation within city administrative boundary and nearby rural areas. Gross primary production (GPP) of vegetation in global urban areas is one of important metrics for assessing the impacts of urbanization on terrestrial ecosystems. ...

Soil moisture, a crucial property for Earth surface research, has been focused widely in various studies. The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) global products at 36 km and 9 km (called P36 and AP9 in this research) have been published from April 2015. ...

One of the primary goals of launching an ocean color satellite is to obtain over the global ocean synoptic measurements of primary production (PP), a measure of phytoplankton photosynthesis. To reach this ultimate goal, in addition to precise measurements ...

Tree species distribution is valuable for forest resource management. However, it is a challenge to classify tree species in subtropical regions due to complex landscapes and limitations of remote sensing data. The objective of this study was to propose a ...

Savannas cover a wide climatic gradient across large portions of the Earth’s land surface and are an important component of the terrestrial biosphere. Savannas have been undergoing changes that alter the composition and structure of their vegetation such ...

Instance segmentation in aerial images is an important and challenging task. Most of the existing methods have adapted instance segmentation algorithms developed for natural images to aerial images. However, these methods easily suffer from performance ...

Morel’s “Optical modeling of the upper ocean in relation to its biogenous matter content (Case I waters)” (J. Geophys. Res. - Oceans, Vol. 93, pp. 107,49-10,768, 1988) laid the groundwork to model the optical properties of natural waters based on the ...

Satellite retrievals of columnar nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) are essential for the characterization of nitrogen oxides (NO_x) processes and impacts. The requirements of modeled a priori profiles present an outstanding bottleneck in operational satellite NO₂ ...

Ice-rich permafrost thaws as a result of Arctic warming, and the land surface collapses to form characteristic thermokarst landscapes. Thermokarst landscapes can bring instability to the permafrost layer, affecting regional geomorphology, hydrology, and ...

Detecting and tracking moving targets through foliage is difficult, and for many cases even impossible in regular aerial images and videos. We present an initial light-weight and drone-operated 1D camera array that supports parallel synthetic aperture ...

The Chinese High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS) program has successfully launched 7 civilian satellites since 2010. These satellites are named by Gaofen (meaning high resolution in Chinese, hereafter noted as GF). To combine the advantages of ...

The chlorophyll/carotenoid index (CCI) is increasingly used for remotely tracking the phenology of photosynthesis. However, CCI is restricted to few satellites incorporating the 531 nm band. This study reveals that the Moderate Resolution Imaging ...

Bottom depth (H) of optically shallow waters can be retrieved from multiband imagery, where remote sensing reflectance (Rrs) are commonly used as the input. Because of the difficulties of removing the atmospheric effects in coastal areas, quite often, there ...

This study mapped the areal extent, identified the species composition, and analyzed the changes of salt marshes in the intertidal zone of China during the period 1985–2019. With the aid of the cloud platform of the Google Earth Engine, we selected ...

TanSat is China’s first greenhouse gases observing satellite. In recent years, substantial progresses have been achieved on retrieving column-averaged CO₂ dry air mole fraction (XCO₂). However, relatively few attempts have been made to estimate ...

Canopy cover is an important parameter affecting forest succession, carbon fluxes, and wildlife habitats. Several global maps with different spatial resolutions have been produced based on satellite images, but facing the deficiency of reliable references ...

Light scattering by pure water and seawater is a fundamental optical property that plays a critical role in ocean optics and ocean color studies. We briefly review the theory of molecular scattering in liquid and electrolyte solutions and focus on the ...

Leaf area index (LAI) is an essential climate variable that is crucial to understand the global vegetation change. Long-term satellite LAI products have been applied in many global vegetation change studies. However, these LAI products contain various ...

Timely and accurate information on tree species (TS) is crucial for developing strategies for sustainable management and conservation of artificial and natural forests. Over the last four decades, advances in remote sensing technologies have made TS ...

Land surface phenology (LSP) enables global-scale tracking of ecosystem processes, but its utility is limited in drylands due to low vegetation cover and resulting low annual amplitudes of vegetation indices (VIs). Due to the importance of drylands for ...

Accurately monitoring the spatiotemporal dynamics of impervious surfaces is very important for understanding the process of urbanization. However, the complicated makeup and spectral heterogeneity of impervious surfaces create difficulties for impervious ...

Remote sensing of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) provides new possibilities to estimate terrestrial gross primary production (GPP). To mitigate the angular and canopy structural effects on original SIF observed by sensors (SIF_obs), it is ...

Despite the promising performance on benchmark datasets that deep convolutional neural networks have exhibited in single image super-resolution (SISR), there are two underlying limitations to existing methods. First, current supervised learning-based SISR ...

Waveform broadening effects of large-footprint lidar caused by terrain slopes are still a great challenge limiting the estimation accuracy of forest aboveground biomass (AGB) over mountainous areas. Slope-adaptive metrics of waveforms were proposed in our ...