Dear Colleagues,

Biodiversity is increasingly recognized as a key factor in the maintenance of ecosystem function, processes, and services, and a significant amount of conservation efforts have been focused around sustaining biodiversity. Biodiversity is defined by the number and diversity of species in an ecosystem, their interactions with each other, and their environment. Biodiversity has come to broadly include the diversity of taxonomic/systematic/genetic attributes, morphological/structural attributes, and their ecological/functional traits. Losses of biodiversity have a major impact on the stability and resilience of ecosystems, possibly by loss of functional traits associated with resource capture and decomposition.  Human actions now drive climate and land use changes throughout the globe, which are causing major losses of biodiversity. Human actions impact the climate and seasonality, and the magnitude and timing of disturbance events (e.g., drought and wildfires); such actions create pollution and contamination in the water, air, and soil, and have many other impacts that accelerate species losses, so as to alter ecosystem processes, functions, and their services. The pace of global change requires a rapid increase in knowledge about species numbers, compositions, conditions, and interactions with themselves and the environments they utilize. Remote sensing provides the only feasible way to measure and monitor these changes at the necessary scales. Today’s satellite and aircraft instruments provide a wide range of observational capability, in terms of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolutions, especially when combined with “big data” computational capacity and in situ monitoring systems.

We would like to invite you to submit articles about your recent research with respect to the following topics.

• Direct mapping of biodiversity and changes in biodiversity using Remote Sensing data (species that are directly measured): Methods and evaluations.
• Indirect mapping of biodiversity using Remote Sensing data (species and interactions that are not directly measured): Methods and evaluations
• Remote Sensing of changing composition, density or habitats: Methods and evaluations.
• Remote Sensing of biodiversity and climate change: Methods and evaluations.
• Remote Sensing of ecosystem functions: Methods and evaluations.
• Remote Sensing of tipping points and biodiversity change: Methods and evaluations.
• Remote Sensing of ecosystem services: Methods and evaluations.
• Comparison and evaluation of different remote sensing methods for monitoring biodiversity conservation.
• Improvement and evaluation of input data needed for modeling biodiversity, and for predicting the efficacy of conservation efforts.
• Review articles covering one or more of these topics are also welcome.

Professor Susan L. Ustin
Guest Editors