**Preface to "Applications of Remote Sensing Data in Mapping of Forest Growing Stock and Biomass"**

Forested areas and stock biomass are of interest in a climatic change scenario, with increasing carbon emissions. The forest canopy plays an important role in ecosystem services, which can provide soil protection against erosion, water management cycles, biomass production and carbon stock.

Surveying regular forested areas for biophysical measurement and inventory purposes is time-consuming and very expensive. In this way, remote sensing has proven to be a very important and useful tool in the cartography of the forested areas in recent years, for canopy changes analysis and biophysical variable modelling, such as canopy density, basal area growing and biomass stocking. Based on satellite image bands, it is possible to derive vegetation indices and allometric models to estimate forest cover characteristics and variations in the amount of biomass.

Nowadays, several spatial agencies provide regular and free satellite images, with high quality and resolution, over almost all continents and countries. Due to improvements in technology, which are followed by price reductions, local image capture is increasingly accessible to researchers, giving them the autonomy to develop and share a wide variety of projects. Several original manuscripts from different research teams and countries were submitted to this Special Issue, which led to 13 published papers. With regard to study area, the published papers range from purely forested areas to agroforestry and urban areas. Regarding remote sensing methods and techniques, both free and commercial satellite images, and LiDAR images collected using UAV and classified were processed.

> **Jos ´e Aranha** *Editor*
