Revolutionizing Agriculture and Natural Resource Management with Artificial Intelligence Approaches

Dear Colleagues,

Agriculture and natural resource systems lie at the nexus of food security, climate resilience, biodiversity, and rural livelihoods. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI)—with a particular emphasis on machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL)—from GeoAI and foundation models to AI-enabled sensing at the edge are transforming how we observe, understand, and steward working landscapes.

This Special Issue of Informatics examines how AI is reshaping agriculture and natural resource management through GeoAI, AIoT, computer vision, UAVs, and field robotics. We invite original research and comprehensive review articles that advance theoretical understanding, propose novel methodologies, or present innovative practical AI approaches that turn Big Earth Data from Earth observation (EO)-based satellites, UAVs, and in situ/AIoT sensors into decision-ready insights for understanding crop planning, crop health, yield forecasting, soil and water management, biodiversity monitoring, and risk assessment. By uniting theoretical advances in AI with field-ready systems, this Special Issue aims to chart new directions across GeoAI, AIoT, computer vision, UAVs, and field robotics for agriculture and natural resource management.

We welcome submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Big Earth Data and GeoAI for crop health, crop yield, soil health, evapotranspiration, and drought/stress monitoring;
• AI approaches of spatiotemporal forecasting for agro-ecological systems;
• Edge and AIoT systems for scalable field analytics;
• Computer vision for disease/weed detection, phenotyping, and quality grading;
• Autonomous, multi-modal UAV systems from sensing to actuation;
• Field robotics: autonomous scouting and precision spraying/harvesting;
• AI applications for water allocation/quality monitoring; watershed-scale modeling and decision support;
• The role of AI in biodiversity assessment, restoration monitoring, and anti-deforestation analytics;
• Integrating AI approaches together with remote sensing data such as satellite, weather stations and in situ data in monitoring health management and sustainable agricultural practices.

Dr. Sarawut Ninsawat
Dr. Jaturong Som-ard
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. Informatics is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly 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 1800 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.

• agriculture
• natural resource management
• big earth data
• artificial intelligence
• AIoT
• computer vision