**Preface to "Land Surface Monitoring Based on Satellite Imagery"**

This book offers readers an overview of the different means of exploiting remote sensing to monitor land surfaces, a phenomenon which plays a significant role in the study of climate change and global warming. This overview highlights how novel approaches employ satellite measurements to improve the detection of land surface changes at the level of global coverage by compensating the in situ measurements lack in terms of spatial and temporal resolution. Land surface parameters from remote sensing are incredibly attractive for applications in different environmental fields, such as land use/change, monitoring of vegetation and soil water stress, and early warning and detection of forest fires and drought. Typically, the practice of monitoring land cover changes is based on the definition of vegetation indices, employing methods to exploit the surface information provided by the channels in the visible and the infrared spectra.
