Land Cover and Land Cover Change Monitoring

Dear Colleagues,

The current global economic and environmental crisis forces nations to carefully manage their natural resources. This goes hand in hand with the demand for more and better information on the state of the environment. Hence, the need is increasing more and more to identify developments and trends as early as possible and to assess their impact for environmental and spatial planning policies in order to avoid or counteract harming activities and for providing the basis for sustainable management. Land cover and its change can provide important environmental indicators to support these needs, leading to a much stronger use of remote sensing on all scales and over long periods deploying all available past, present, and future sensors.

The Special Issue on land cover and land cover change monitoring will address these demands providing examples from recent research to cope, for instance, with

• the ever increasing availability of Earth Observation data offering unprecedented opportunities to improve our knowledge about the changing environment over time
• the sheer amount of remote sensing data available today and even more in the future requiring appropriate techniques for efficient data analysis
• reliable and widely accepted methods to validate land cover classification results on local up to continental level
• efforts towards harmonization of thematic class definitions as a pre-condition for exchanging land cover information between different user groups, across borders and over time
• integration of land cover/land cover change information in environmental modelling, and decisions taking, e.g., improved protection, quality of life, and sustainable management into consideration.

Prof. Dr. Steffen Kuntz
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. Sustainability 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.

• land cover
• land cover change
• remote sensing
• land cover data classification and analysis
• data quality
• harmonization of land cover information
• environmental modelling
• protection and sustainable management