Special Section Guest Editorial: Advances in Remote Sensing for Monitoring Global Environmental Changes

Abstract

The 21st century will experience widespread global changes due to climatic variations, shifting demographics, population migration, and economic development. These environmental changes are expected to have significant impacts on the quantity and quality of water, air, and land resources across the globe. The complexity of global environmental changes will pose significant challenges to the scientific community. Remote sensing, with its capability for handling spatial and temporal information of the earth's systems, has been extensively used to understand the problems of global environmental changes and their potential solutions. This special section focuses on advances in remote sensing for monitoring global environmental changes, and is comprised of ten full-length papers selected from a number of areas of expertise. Such a collection improves our understanding of global environmental changes through various types of assessment in which remote sensing technologies have demonstrated their application potential in dealing with different sustainability issues. This special section elucidates three important themes related to remote sensing for addressing global environmental changes: (1) land use and land cover changes; (2) environmental monitoring to address physical and ecological variations; and (3) cyber-enabled assessment of environmental changes via data quality improvement and visualization.