Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue aims to promote and support advancements in research activities in the domain of individual tree detection (ITD), which has benefited tremendously from the proliferation of low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and data science industry in recent years. Currently, ITD finds applications in multiple sub-sectors within forestry, including forest health monitoring, biomass mapping, forest growth modeling, deforestation tracking, disturbance and recovery analysis, canopy gap quantification, UAV-supported seed sowing, species diversity estimation, biodiversity conservation, land-use/land-change analysis, natural resource management, restoration assessment, pest detection, and three-dimensional (3D) canopy structure analysis, among others. More and more use case scenarios are emerging day-by-day with the support of state-of-the-art technological amalgamations such as UAV-LiDAR (light detection and ranging) and data fusion strategies. However, there are still a couple of issues that need attention, such as model transferability across sites, the development of novel ITD algorithms that are applicable to dense canopies, and wall-to-wall mapping with the integration of UAV data with other open-source satellite/LiDAR data sources of differing resolutions (e.g., NASA GEDI).

We hereby invite authors to consider this open-access SI to publish their original and/or review articles in the broad field of forest remote sensing and associated spheres related to ITD and its applications.

With gratitude,

Dr. Eben Broadbent
Dr. Adrian Cardil
Dr. Ana Paula Dalla Corte
Dr. Pabodha Galgamuwa G.A.
Guest Editors

Midhun (Mikey) Mohan
Shaurya Bajaj
Guest Editor Assistants

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. Drones is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 2600 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.

• forest health monitoring and management
• forest attributes mensuration and modeling
• individual tree crown delineation
• species classification
• biomass mapping
• pest management
• 3D point clouds
• UAV-LiDAR
• multispectral and hyperspectral data
• data fusion, machine learning and deep learning
• time series analysis