We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Yangquan Chen has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Section “Drones in Agriculture and Forestry” in Drones (ISSN 2504-446X).

Prof. Dr. Yangquan Chen is a Full Professor at the School of Engineering, University of California, Merced. He was on the faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. of the Utah State University, Logan, Utah from 2000 to 2012 where he was a tenured Associate Professor and the Director for the Center for Self-Organizing and Intelligent Systems (CSOIS) from 2004-2012. Prof. Dr. Chen has published many books, papers and patents. He served as the General Co-Chair for ICUAS 2014, 2017 and 2019 (International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems), and on the editorial board for journals such as IEEE Trans. on Control Systems Technology, ISA Trans., the ASME Journal of Dynamics Systems, Measurement and Control, IFAC journals of Control Engineering Practice as well as Mechatronics, Fractional Calculus and Applied Analysis, and Nonlinear Dynamics. He also serves as the Topical Editor-in-Chief in Field Robotics, International Journal of Advanced Robotics Systems (IJARS) and Intelligent Service Robotics. He serves as an Editorial Board Member of MDPI Applied Sciences and Sensors. His ISI Publon H-index is 67 with more than 19.6k citations, Google Scholar citation is 43.2k with H-index 91, H10-index 540. Prof. Dr. Chen was in the 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 Highly Cited Researchers list by Clarivate. He won Research of The Year awards from Utah State University (2012) and UC Merced (2020), respectively. In 2018, for his cumulative work in drones, Dr. Chen won "Senate Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award" that recognizes a faculty member who has energetically and creatively applied his or her professional expertise and scholarship to benefit the local, regional, national or international community.

The following is a short Q&A with Prof. Dr. Yangquan Chen:

The main appeal is the nature of the journal that offers a centralized forum to disseminate all innovative research around drones, yet with a potential to maximize the visibility and impact of papers via open access. The Section “Drones Agriculture and Forestry” is a unique platform that focuses on agriculture and forestry, a major portion of all the drone applications. I had a vision of UAS-based “personal remote sensing” from 2005, now I add to this vision that drones are generators of big data and drones can be just edge devices that can do tiny machine learning with embedded AI. Drones can be used as both sensors and actuators, as a single agent or as a swarm.

We will seek advice from all board members with new ideas. All efforts should be impact-driven. Multidisciplinary research will be encouraged. Collaboration with major drone-related conferences will be established for sustaining Special Issues that publish peer-reviewed selected papers from the conferences.

3. As the Section Editor-in-Chief of Drones, how do you evaluate whether a paper is of general interest?
Each paper should follow some of these “i” words: informing, inspiring, innovative, instilling, impressing, and inviting (according to Bruce J. West). In order to attract general interest, papers should address if they belong to one of the following three categories: “First”, “Best” or “Different” (according to Richard Magin) and also check the following three questions: “So what?”, “Who cares?” and “Why you?”. Another very important question is “Are the presented results reproducible by peers?”.