Dear Colleagues,

Prairies and other forms of grassland environments are among the most widespread of Earth’s biomes, and represent the native assemblage of plants and animals for roughly a third of the land area on the planet. Dynamic and responsive systems, they also present an opportunity to identify early warning signs of ecosystem change, in response to global environmental shifts, such as climate change, rising atmospheric CO₂, increased nitrogen deposition, and alterations in land use or management practices. This Special Issue of Applied Sciences, “Monitoring the Prairie”, seeks to compile recent scholarly research that applies remote sensing, GIS, data analytics, or image processing to the study of grasslands and prairies, with the goal of furthering our understanding of how prairies, as representative ecosystems, respond to multiple factors of global change and interact with human systems.
Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Species distribution mapping and modeling;
• Techniques for monitoring grassland variation and changes;
• Empirical and process modeling of prairie biophysical properties;
• Integration of multiple data sources for grassland analysis;
• Nutrient and water cycling in grasslands;
• Land use and land cover change in grasslands;
• Ecological effects of grassland management—fire and grazing;
• Vegetative effects of soil and groundwater contamination;
• Human economic and health factors in prairie land use and management;
• Stochastic factors in grassland restoration;
• Adaptive conservation and avoidance of ecosystem state shift.

Prof. Dr. Douglas G. Goodin
Prof. Dr. Laura M. Moley
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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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. Applied Sciences 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 2400 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.

• Geospatial analysis
• Prairie
• Grasslands
• GIS
• Remote sensing
• Big data
• Environmental change
• Environmental monitoring
• Geographic imaging
• Vegetation geography
• Landscape ecology.