Modeling Post-fire Forest Vegetation Dynamics Based on Remote Sensing Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Wildfires have significant environmental and socio-economic impacts, affecting ecosystems and people worldwide. Under particular conditions, some of them can turn into extreme wildfire events, causing a disproportional amount of loss and environmental damage, including land degradation and biodiversity loss. Wildfires have become more frequent and severe in recent decades, especially in areas that have experienced climate change pressures over a longer duration. Moreover, in the coming decades, it is expected that the intensity and impact of wildfires will grow depending on the variability of climate parameters. Forests are the main ecosystems affected by wildfires. Forests in certain biomes, like the Mediterranean, are fire-adapted, although they now face some threats due to altered fire regimes, and the monitoring of fire impacts and post-fire recovery processes is of the utmost importance for ecological research and fire prevention. This Special Issue aims to present and promote original scientific contributions, concerning innovative remote sensing monitoring approaches, data, as well as techniques for the estimation of post-fire vegetation state and dynamics with an emphasis on fire-affected territory mapping, the evaluation of post-fire vegetation disturbance and regrowth, fire severity estimations as factors for forest regrowth, influencing factors of wildfires, and the assessment of their impact on vegetation recovery.

Papers focusing on remote sensing applications for modeling post-fire forest vegetation dynamics may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Analysis of fire impacts in forest environments;
• Assessment of fire impacts on landscape characteristics and their changes;
• Estimation of forest canopy status and post-fire vegetation recovery;
• Predictive assessments and mapping of post-fire biodiversity patterns in forests;
• Post-fire vegetation structural characteristics;
• Classification, detection, and segmentation of post-fire vegetation cover;
• Post-fire forest modelling and climate change adaptation;
• Post-fire forest biotic and abiotic disturbance mapping;
• Remote sensing methods to quantify biophysical parameters of post-fire vegetation;
• Multispectral and hyperspectral data and methods for post-fire forest monitoring;
• Lidar, UAV, and SAR data in monitoring post-fire forest environments;
• New algorithms and techniques for post-fire forest monitoring.

Dr. Daniela Avetisyan
Dr. Iva Ivanova
Dr. Nataliya Stankova
Dr. Cristiano Foderi
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 2600 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.

• remote sensing
• fire impact
• forest vegetation dynamics
• post-fire vegetation recovery
• post-fire spatial analyses