Remote Sensing in Assessing Responses of Vegetation to Drought

Dear Colleagues,

Vegetation drought is one of the costliest natural disasters due to its spatial coverage, frequency, intensity, and duration. Drought has devastating impacts on agriculture and other ecosystems and its occurrence is expected to be more frequent in the face of increasing climatic variability. Drought is one of the main drivers in constraining several aspects of vegetation including productivity. Understanding and assessing drought is a crucial challenge but extremely important. To understand vegetation response to drought (soil moisture deficiency) in a broader perspective and larger spatial extent, assessing drought quantitively using remote sensing indices is required. Studies on drought assessment are necessary to make drought less harmful to society.

Here, we invite manuscripts on the use of remote sensing concepts, methods, models, and data products to assess vegetation drought in terms of drought duration, intensity, frequency, and any other aspects related to ecosystem structure, function, and services. Preference will be given to studies that consider the responses/feedback of vegetation to drought ranging from field to landscape level. The direct quantification of drought is a difficult task, so studies that identify/assess drought by its effects on different aspects of vegetation would be primarily covered in this special issue. Therefore, the scope of this Special Issue “Remote Sensing in Assessing Responses of Vegetation to Drought" covers phenological, physiological, biophysical, and other physical and functional responses of vegetation to drought.

Potential topics for this Special Issue include but are not limited to the following:

• Ecosystem responses to water stress-phenological, biophysical, structural, functional, physiological
• Rainfall variability and soil moisture deficit and plant water stress
• Vegetation phenology and drought
• Flash drought
• Vegetation mortality
• Leaf area index, aboveground biomass assessment due to drought
• Vegetation recovery
• Carbon and water cycle gross primary productivity (GPP), net primary productivity (NPP), and evapotranspiration (ET)

Dr. Rajen Bajgain
Dr. Yuting Zhou
Guest Editors

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