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Editorial

Applications of GIS and Remote Sensing in Soil Environment Monitoring

1
Department of Architecture Design and Planning, University of Sassari, 07100 Sassari, Italy
2
Department of Agricultural and Environmental Science, University of Bari, 70121 Bari, Italy
3
Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Aškerčeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2023, 15(18), 13705; https://doi.org/10.3390/su151813705
Submission received: 7 September 2023 / Accepted: 12 September 2023 / Published: 14 September 2023
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Applications of GIS and Remote Sensing in Soil Environment Monitoring)
Monitoring plays an essential role in the efficient and sustainable management of the environment. Accurate and rapid procedures and data enable the activation and implementation of public policies and initiatives with which to address emergencies and medium-term environmental depletion processes. Among these, soil consumption is one of the most important issues. Soil sealing threatens the protection of the environment and the security of food production [1,2] in a world where only 10–12% of natural soils are still available for agriculture [3]. Another important threat to the soil as a resource is the increase in the erosion process. Several studies expect soil erosion to increase in the 21st century due to global climate change and land use [4,5]. At this point, measures to mitigate the effects of soil erosion are currently on the agenda of international institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organization [6] and the European Union [7].
On the other hand, the availability of remote sensing data with greater temporal and spatial resolution has increased recently [8]. This wealth of data, integrated with field observations, enables increasingly efficient monitoring processes. Therefore, it is essential to implement and perfect more accurate and efficient methods and models.
With this in mind, this Special Issue aims to collect various contributions dealing with ways to improve models for managing data in the environmental monitoring process, focusing on soil issues. In this volume, various aspects of environmental monitoring have been addressed in a logical framework. In some cases, the focus was on hazard detection and mapping [9,10,11,12,13]; in others, the focus was on the detection and description of soil properties and their contribution to land use determination [14,15,16]. The papers addressed the issues at different scales: regional scale [10,13,14,17]; watershed scale [9,12]; and field scale [11,17]. The GIS approach is indeed useful for implementing an analytical model at multiple scales, even for estimating soil erosion [18]. Finally, the published review [19] addressed the monitoring of salinization, another problem affecting more than 100 nations [20,21], and gave a general overview of the problem in China, one of the largest food producers with a critical problem in terms of self-sufficiency [22].

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, A.G., B.R. and M.E.; writing—original draft preparation, A.G., B.R. and M.E.; writing—review and editing, A.G., B.R. and M.E. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

References

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MDPI and ACS Style

Ganga, A.; Elia, M.; Repe, B. Applications of GIS and Remote Sensing in Soil Environment Monitoring. Sustainability 2023, 15, 13705. https://doi.org/10.3390/su151813705

AMA Style

Ganga A, Elia M, Repe B. Applications of GIS and Remote Sensing in Soil Environment Monitoring. Sustainability. 2023; 15(18):13705. https://doi.org/10.3390/su151813705

Chicago/Turabian Style

Ganga, Antonio, Mario Elia, and Blaž Repe. 2023. "Applications of GIS and Remote Sensing in Soil Environment Monitoring" Sustainability 15, no. 18: 13705. https://doi.org/10.3390/su151813705

APA Style

Ganga, A., Elia, M., & Repe, B. (2023). Applications of GIS and Remote Sensing in Soil Environment Monitoring. Sustainability, 15(18), 13705. https://doi.org/10.3390/su151813705

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