Dear Colleagues,

Soil contamination is unfortunately a global problem and with an increasing population growth will become one of the biggest challenges to be solved in the future. Due to the fact that soil contaminations include a wide range of natural, synthetic metallic, and organic compounds, and minerals present in a large degree of spatial variations, one of the barriers we face today is the lack of cost-effective and operational approaches to assess soil properties. Using modern distance methods such as proximal remote sensing and imaging spectroscopy is quite possibly the way to go to improve the cost efficiency of currently used methods to determine soil geochemical property as well as concepts used for sampling strategies.

Hence, in this Special Issue, we are looking for novel solutions and approaches that open up the possibilities for quantitative prediction of diverse soil parameters in the lab as well as in a real environment. In particular, we are looking for such solutions allowing synergic use of spectroscopic data covering different spectral regions (e.g., VNIR/SWIR and LWIR) and new techniques achieving higher model accuracy including but not limited to the topics as follows:

• Synergic use of optical and thermal spectroscopic data for quantitative prediction of soil parameters/constituents;
• Moving from lab to real environment: spectral and spatial upscaling, using different platforms;
• New modeling approaches especially those allowing global soil monitoring;
• New solutions to improve soil sampling strategy;
• Potential of state-of-the art sensors and satellite systems for soil monitoring;
• Potential of future sensors and satellite systems for soil monitoring.

Dr. Veronika Kopačková-Strnadová
Dr. Mario Marchetti
Guest Editors

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• Soil monitoring
• Soil geochemical property
• Soil degradation and contamination
• Optical and thermal remote sensing
• Soil property modeling
• Spectral and spatial upscaling
• Global soil monitoring
• Imaging spectroscopy