Abstract
Urban forests and green infrastructures at large are of critical importance for contemporary cities as they provide a wide range of ecosystem services (ESS) that enhance the quality of life of urban dwellers. Remote sensing technologies have greatly contributed to assessing and mapping the spatial distribution of ESS in urban areas, although more research is needed given the availability of new sensors from multiple satellites and platforms and the particular characteristics of urban environments (e.g., high heterogeneity). This Special Issue hosts papers focusing on the temporal and spatial dynamics of urban forests with special attention given to the most recent remote sensing technologies as well as advanced methods for processing geospatial data and extracting meaningful information.
Highlights
Through the provision of ecosystem services (ESS), urban forests and green infrastructures provide multiple benefits for urban dwellers making cities more resilient to climate change by enhancing, for example, the degree of shading, evaporative cooling, biodiversity, rainwater interception, and storage and filtration functions [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The majority of available studies have considered one or more ESS provided by specific forest areas in cities and proposed remote sensing methods to quantify the amount of services in relation to their benefits for citizens
Recent studies have attempted to assess the ESS provided by urban green spaces through the integration of social data with remotely sensed data, such as high-resolution satellite images and Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data [7,8]
Summary
Through the provision of ecosystem services (ESS), urban forests and green infrastructures provide multiple benefits for urban dwellers making cities more resilient to climate change by enhancing, for example, the degree of shading, evaporative cooling, biodiversity, rainwater interception, and storage and filtration functions [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Given the increasing availability of satellite images from different sensors, the spread of LiDAR data and growing potential of cloud-based services (i.e., Google Earth Engine or Amazon Web Services), there is a need for innovative research focusing on advanced remote sensing applications for monitoring and assessing urban forest areas and associated ESS. This Special Issue includes research studies focusing on the temporal dynamics of urban forests [9,10] and their distribution in space through the application of advanced semantic segmentation techniques [11] and in relationship with green space accessibility [12], the implementation of laser scanner for improving allometry-based forest biometrics [13], and a review investigating the state of the art of remote sensing in urban forestry [14] (see Table 1). A Methodology to Monitor Urban Expansion and Green Space Change Using a Time Series of Multi-Sensor SPOT and Sentinel-2A Images
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