Mapping Ecosystem Services Flows and Dynamics Using Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

Human population growth, changing lifestyles, and growing demands for natural resources put the world’s ecosystems under increasing pressure, often with severe impacts on their capacity to provide ecosystem services (e.g., food, clean water, fertile soils, timber, and recreational value). By emphasizing this critical role of nature in securing human well-being, the interdisciplinary ecosystem service framework has become a key concept in international agreements (e.g., the European Union Biodiversity Strategy and the UN Sustainable Development Goals).

Policies, trade, and human travel have led to a spatiotemporal disconnect between service supply (where and when services are produced) and demand (where and when they are used). These teleconnections also manifest as ‘embedded’ ecosystem services (e.g., virtual water content of traded agricultural commodities). For example, significant proportions of global cropland and pasture are used for international food trade, and embedded crop and pasture land is disproportionately allocated among countries.

Remote sensing (herein broadly defined as noncontact optical, radar, or thermal imaging) provides a unique opportunity to help to better understand those ecosystem service flows across landscapes, countries, and continents by providing detailed, recurrent, and multiscalar spatially-explicit estimates of the supply and demand of ecosystem services. Assessing both supply and demand, however, often requires using other ancillary information, such as trade data, survey/national statistics, economic and statistical models, place-based empirical studies, etc. Additionally, the combination of ‘unstructured’ information, including social media data, with biophysical data and models is an increasingly important field of research.

This Special Issue on “Mapping ecosystem services flows and dynamics using remote sensing“ calls for manuscripts that demonstrate successful combinations of remotely sensed and other data or models to map the flows and dynamics of ecosystem services. We welcome recent technological and/or methodological innovations using remotely sensed information for mapping, monitoring, or measuring dynamics of ecosystem services in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems, or detecting (changes in) ecosystem service flows. We particularly encourage studies that consider multiple ecosystem services (covering provisioning, regulating, and cultural ecosystem services) and interdisciplinary approaches.

Specific topics include, but are not limited to:

• Use of remote sensing data to assess spatial and temporal disconnects between ecosystem service supply and demand;
• Monitoring of changes in ecosystem services flows;
• Temporal dynamics of ecosystem services;
• Impact of human use of natural resources on socioecological systems, ecosystem integrity, and biodiversity elsewhere;
• Technological and methodological innovation at the interface of ecosystem service research and Earth observation, with a focus on linking socioeconomic and remote sensing data.

Full Articles, Reviews, and Technical Notes or Letters can be included in the Special Issue (see https://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/instructions for more information about article types). Interdisciplinary studies making use of remote sensing data from any source (satellite, airborne, drones, field spectroscopy) are especially welcomed. If you have any questions about the scope of a proposed paper or whether it would be eligible to be considered for this Special Issue, please get in touch.

Dr. Anna Cord
Dr. Guy Ziv
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. Remote Sensing 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 2700 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-based monitoring
• Ecosystem service supply, demand, and flow
• Socioecological systems
• Temporal dynamics
• Interdisciplinary approaches