Dear Colleagues,

Land is coming under growing pressure from ever-increased competition to control land resources and uses. For example, urban expansion competes with production of food, animal feed and wood products. The ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement of climate change assume massive deployment of negative emission technologies, such as afforestation, bioenergy production combined with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct air capture through “artificial trees” (DAC). All such technologies have one thing in common—they are enormously space consuming. At the same time, land is already a scarce resource, manifested for example through the controversial rush for land in the global South—“land grabbing”. Moreover, climate change exacerbates these tensions, as it increases the frequency of extreme weather events that hinder land’s capacity to supply vital services and contribute to environmental degradation. In response to these challenges, a number of global initiatives and projects are underway. For example, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or the Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) framework initiatives aim to support countries in defining national baselines and targets to achieve LDN and SDGs. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) defines LDN as “a state whereby the amount and quality of land resources necessary to support ecosystem functions and services and enhance food security remain stable or increase within specified temporal and spatial scales and ecosystems”. Remote sensing technology becomes essential in providing consistent definitions in these frameworks and the best available methodologies for continuous global/regional/local assessment and monitoring of key indicators of land degradation status: Land cover use and land cover change, land productivity and carbon stocks above and below ground. The goal of this Special Issue is to ensure a consistent representation and comparability of indicators of land degradation over time, and to understand variability, trends and changes in land degradation based on the indicators and metrics derived from continuous long-term satellite data across multiple scales including ground measurements and ancillary datasets. The following is a tentative list of papers to appear in this Special Issue.

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• Land productivity
• Land Cover
• Land degradation
• Vegetation Indices
• NDVI
• Remote Sensing
• Vegetation Trends
• Phenology
• Climate Change
• Drought
• Arctic Vegetation
• Sahelian Vegetation
• Dry-lands
• Desertification
• Carbon Cycle
• Dynamics Vegetation Models