Monitoring Water, Vegetation, and Soil Condition in Farmland Ecosystems: Integration of Multi-Source Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

The accurate and timely monitoring of water, vegetation, and soil variables in farmland ecosystems plays an irreplaceable role in optimizing farmland management for maximizing crop productivity. The recent and rapid development of different sensors (e.g., optical, SAR, and LiDAR) with different temporal and spatial resolutions has greatly promoted the potential of near real-time crop monitoring from space, which is demanded in precision agriculture. Multi-source remote sensing (RS) can provide near real-time and accurate spatial information on farmland surfaces in large areas, such as crop types, crop water deficits, leaf area indexes (LAIs), leaf chlorophyll contents, and soil moistures. The incorporation of dynamic crop traits from multi-source RS data into crop growth models to minimize discrete performance gaps and spatiotemporal gaps has been recently highlighted. However, differences in the association between different RS platforms and the dynamic inconsistencies in the correlation between crop varieties exist. New approaches for effectively fusing multi-source RS data to improve crop growth monitoring are required. Developing advanced approaches for quantifying the soil‒water‒plant relationship based on multi-source RS is urgent as well. This Special Issue will focus on the advancement of multi-source remote sensing in monitoring water, vegetation, and soil conditions in farmland ecosystems. We welcome novel research, reviews, and opinion pieces covering all the related topics, which include but are not limited to:

• Retrieving soil moisture and nutrients in farmlands;
• Cultivation structure extraction and area estimation;
• Crop trait (crop types, LAIs, crop water deficits, and leaf chlorophyll contents) inversion;
• Assimilation of multi-source RS into crop growth models;
• Optimization of an irrigation system and the evaluation of water productivity;
• Construction of a regional intelligent irrigation decision-making system;
• Further understanding of the soil‒water‒crop relationship.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Remote Sensing.

Prof. Dr. Ningbo Cui
Dr. Taifeng Dong
Dr. Cong Wang
Prof. Dr. Yulei Xie
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Earth is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.