Remote Sensing, Volume 6, Issue 5

Wetlands are one of the most important ecosystems on Earth. There is an urgent need to quantify the biophysical parameters (e.g., plant height, aboveground biomass) and map total remaining areas of wetlands in order to evaluate the ecological status...

The vegetation in the forest-tundra ecotone zone is expected to be highly affected by climate change and requires effective monitoring techniques. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) has been proposed as a tool for the detection of small pioneer trees for...

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) including Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer-Global Digital Elevation Model (ASTER GDEM), Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), and Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 (GM...

The near real-time NRL global tropical cyclone (TC) monitoring system based on multiple satellite passive microwave (PMW) sensors is improved with a new inter-sensor calibration scheme to correct the biases caused by differences in these sensor’s hi...

The first airborne hyperspectral campaign in the Antarctic Peninsula region was carried out by the British Antarctic Survey and partners in February 2011. This paper presents an insight into the applicability of currently available radiative transfer...

Forest disturbances in central Europe caused by fungal pests may result in widespread tree mortality. To assess the state of health and to detect disturbances of entire forest ecosystems, up-to-date knowledge of the tree species diversity is essentia...

Lop Nur is a famous dry lake in the arid region of China. It was an important section of the ancient “Silk Road”, famous in history as the prosperous communication channel between Eastern and Western cultures. At present, there is no surface water in...

On-orbit geometric calibration is a key technology to guarantee the geometric quality of high-resolution optical satellite imagery. In this paper, we present an approach for the on-orbit geometric calibration of high-resolution optical satellite imag...

Image quality is important for taking full advantage of satellite data. As a common indicator, the National Imagery Interpretability Scale (NIIRS) is widely used for image quality assessment and provides a comprehensive representation of image qualit...

Quantitative, spatially explicit estimates of canopy nitrogen are essential for understanding the structure and function of natural and managed ecosystems. Methods for extracting nitrogen estimates via hyperspectral remote sensing have been an active...

Lyzenga’s method is used widely for radiative transfer analysis because of its simplicity of application to cases of shallow-water coral reef ecosystems with limited information of water properties. WorldView-2 imagery has been used previously to stu...

Despite the existence of long term remotely sensed datasets, change detection methods are limited and often remain an obstacle to the effective use of time series approaches in remote sensing applications to Land Change Science. This paper establishe...

Terrestrial laser scanning is a promising technique for automatic measurements of tree stems. The objectives of the study were (1) to develop and validate a new method for the detection, classification and measurements of tree stems and canopies usin...

Land Surface Temperature (LST) is one of the key inputs for Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere transfer modeling in terrestrial ecosystems. In the frame of BIOSPEC (Linking spectral information at different spatial scales with biophysical parameters of Medi...

In a previous study, a daily evaporative fraction (EF) parameterization scheme was derived based on day–night differences in surface temperature, air temperature, and net radiation. Considering the advantage that incoming solar radiation can be readi...

The transferability of a visible and near-infrared (VNIR) model for soil organic matter (SOM) estimation in riparian landscapes is explored. The results indicate that for the soil samples with air-drying, grinding and 2-mm sieving pretreatment, the m...

Mediterranean pine forests in Spain experience wildland fire events with different frequencies, intensities, and severities which result in diverse socio-ecological consequences. In order to predict fire severity, spectral indices derived from remote...

Observing trends in global ecosystem dynamics is an important first step, but attributing these trends to climate variability represents a further step in understanding Earth system changes. In the present study, we classified global Ecosystem Respon...

Spectral vegetation indices have been the primary resources for characterizing grassland vegetation based on remotely sensed data. However, the use of spectral indices for vegetation characterization in grasslands has been challenged by the confoundi...

Satellite microwave scatterometers are the principal source of global synoptic-scale ocean vector wind (OVW) measurements for a number of scientific and operational oceanic wind applications. However, for extreme wind events such as tropical cyclone...

The development of advanced laboratory-based imaging hyperspectral sensors, such as SisuCHEMA, has created an opportunity to extract compositional information of mineral mixtures from spectral images. Determining proportions of minerals on rock surfa...

Lake Urmia is the 20th largest lake and the second largest hyper saline lake (before September 2010) in the world. It is also the largest inland body of salt water in the Middle East. Nevertheless, the lake has been in a critical situation in recent...

The OLIVE (On Line Interactive Validation Exercise) platform is dedicated to the validation of global biophysical products such as LAI (Leaf Area Index) and FAPAR (Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation). It was developed under the...

Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is an important biophysical parameter of terrestrial ecosystems. Variation of FVC is a major problem in research fields related to remote sensing applications. In this study, the global FVC from 1982 to 2011 was esti...

Attitude jitter is a common phenomenon in the application of high resolution satellites, which may result in large errors of geo-positioning and mapping accuracy. Therefore, it is critical to detect and compensate attitude jitter to explore the full...

Land cover is one of the essential climate variables of the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI). In this context, the Land Cover CCI (LC CCI) project aims at building global land cover maps suitable for climate modeling based on Earth observation...

On 13 January 2012, the Italian vessel, Costa Concordia, wrecked offshore Giglio Island, along the coast of Tuscany (Italy). The ship partially sunk, lying on the starboard side on a 22° steep rocky seabed, making the stability conditions of the ship...

In recent times, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as tools for environmental remote sensing has become more commonplace. Compared to traditional airborne remote sensing, UAVs can provide finer spatial resolution data (up to 1 cm/pixel) and...

The application of remotely sensed estimates of canopy minus air temperature (Tc-Ta) for detecting crop water stress can be limited in semi-arid regions, because of the lack of full ground cover (GC) at water-critical crop stages. Thus, soil backgrou...

LiDAR-derived slope models may be used to detect abandoned logging roads in steep forested terrain. An object-based classification approach of abandoned logging road detection was employed in this study. First, a slope model of the study site in Mari...

Although it is assumed that satellite-derived descriptions of fire activity will differ depending on the dataset selected for analysis, as of yet, the effects of failed and false detections at the pixel level and on an instantaneous basis have not be...

The objective of this study was to obtain up-to-date information on land use and to identify long term changes in land use, especially rice, aquaculture and other crops in Ben Tre and Tra Vinh provinces in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Long-term changes in...

Segmentation of urban features is considered a major research challenge in the fields of photogrammetry and remote sensing. However, the dense datasets now readily available through airborne laser scanning (ALS) offer increased potential for 3D objec...

This paper reviews how remotely sensed data have been used to understand the impact of urbanization on global environmental change. We describe how these studies can support the policy and science communities’ increasing need for detailed and up-to-d...

We present a new application of terrestrial laser scanning and mathematical modelling for the quantitative change detection of tree biomass, volume, and structure. We investigate the feasibility of the approach with two case studies on trees, assess...

Estimating forest area at a national scale within the United Nations program of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) is primarily based on land cover information using remote sensing technologies. Timely delivery for a...

Leads with a length on the order of 1000 km occurred in the Beaufort Sea in February 2013. These leads can be observed in Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) images under predominantly clear sky conditions. Sea ice concentrations (S...

Interests in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data analysis is driven by the constantly increased spatial resolutions of the acquired images, where the geometries of scene objects can be better defined than in lower resolution data. This paper addresse...

The determination of wave height by active satellite remote sensing, be it Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) or altimeter, has been a common practice for many years and is now imbedded on many meteorological and oceanographic forecasting systems. Despit...

The objective of this study is to develop models based on both optical and L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data for above ground dry biomass (hereafter AGB) estimation in mountain forests. We chose the site of the Loveh forest, a part of the Hy...

Automatic extraction of building roofs from remote sensing data is important for many applications, including 3D city modeling. This paper proposes a new method for automatic segmentation of raw LIDAR (light detection and ranging) data. Using the gro...

Whilst most hedgerow functions depend upon hedgerow structure and hedgerow network patterns, in many ecological studies information on the fragmentation of hedgerows network and canopy structure is often retrieved in the field in small areas using ac...

In this paper, two mixture models are proposed for modeling heterogeneous regions in single-look and multi-look polarimetric SAR images, along with their corresponding maximum likelihood classifiers for land cover classification. The classical Gaussi...

Sample supervised image analysis, in particular sample supervised segment generation, shows promise as a methodological avenue applicable within Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA). Segmentation is acknowledged as a constituent component...

Temperature is a main driver for most ecological processes, and temperature time series provide key environmental indicators for various applications and research fields. High spatial and temporal resolutions are crucial for detailed analyses in vari...

The ultimate goal of our multi-article series is to demonstrate the Allometric Scaling and Resource Limitation (ASRL) approach for mapping tree heights and biomass. This third article tests the feasibility of the optimized ASRL model over China at bo...

Remote sensing technologies have been commonly used to perform greenhouse detection and mapping. In this research, stereo pairs acquired by very high-resolution optical satellites GeoEye-1 (GE1) and WorldView-2 (WV2) have been utilized to carry out t...

A critical step in object-oriented geospatial analysis (OBIA) is image segmentation. Segments determined from a lower-spatial resolution image can be used as the context to analyse a corresponding image at a higher-spatial resolution. Due to inherent...

Powdery mildew, caused by the fungus Blumeria graminis, is a major winter wheat disease in China. Accurate delineation of powdery mildew infestations is necessary for site-specific disease management. In this study, high-resolution multispectral imag...

Forest environment classification in mountain regions based on single-sensor remote sensing approaches is hindered by forest complexity and topographic effects. Temperate broadleaf forests in western Asia such as the Hyrcanian forest in northern Iran...