Remote Sensing for Impact Evaluation and Project Monitoring

Dear colleagues,

Climate and environmental change are global challenges that require appropriate responses in the areas of agriculture, environmental protection, and disaster risk management, as well as new adaptation strategies. The challenges are already being addressed by large-scale development and financial support programs. However, the positive effects of these programs and projects can be difficult to verify with the established evaluation methods, for example, when project intervention areas are huge and hardly inaccessible, doing evaluation by means of in-situ sampling alone can become prohibitively expensive. Impact evaluation can potentially benefit from new forms of data collection and analysis, such as Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Specifically, remote-sensing data can help to overcome the aforementioned challenges, and it has the potential to complement the range of methods used in project evaluation or to back these with quantifiable evidence from space. Open and free archives of satellite images, such as those provided by NASA or the Copernicus Earth Observation Program, provide a suitable basis for tracking and monitoring the impact of project interventions in large-scale phenomena such as rangeland degradation, deforestation, and the measurement of the extent of natural disasters, as well as changes at the local level such as the improvement of the quality of life of individual households or the expansion of infrastructure. This Special Issue shall therefore showcase (i) the latest developments in the field of remote-sensing research that are relevant for project M&E (e.g., trend and breakpoint analysis, land use, and land cover change relating to rehabilitation projects) and (ii) the actual use of remote sensing in support of project evaluation.

Submissions to this Special Issue would have to clearly indicate or discuss their added value for project M&E.

Specific objectives of this SI shall be:

• Demonstrations of show-cases about the use of remote sensing for M&E in the context of technical and financial cooperation
• Novel developments in remote-sensing research that showcase the added value for project M&E
• Overview and critical discussion about existing data services that are potentially useful for project M&E.

Kind regards

Dr. Fabian Löw
Guest Editor

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. Remote Sensing 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 2700 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.

• remote sensing
• impact
• evaluation
• project monitoring
• ICT