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Research on the service values of urban ecosystems is a hot topic of ecological studies in the current era of rapid urbanization. To quantitatively estimate the ecosystem service value in Chengdu, China from the perspectives of natural ecology and social ecology, the technologies of remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) are...

Image segmentation and geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA) were proposed around the turn of the century as a means to analyze high-spatial-resolution remote sensing images. Since then, object-based approaches have been used to analyze a wide range of images for numerous applications. In this Editorial, we present some highlights of...

Land use/land cover (LULC) maps are now being used across disciplines for many different types of applications, e.g., to analyze urban heat islands or rainfall-runoff dynamics. Traditional map accuracy metrics are limited in this regard, as they only assess LULC map thematic accuracy. In reality, some types of misclassification lead to larger...

Owing to the huge number of species observations that can be collected by non-professional scientists, “citizen science” has great potential to contribute to scientific knowledge on invasive alien species (IAS). Citizen science has existed for centuries, but the recent adoption of information and communications technology (ICT) in this field (e.g...

In this study, we measured and characterized the relative dielectric constant of mineral soils over the 0.3–3.0 frequency range, and compared our measurements with values of three dielectric constant simulation models (the Wang, Dobson, and Mironov models). The interrelationship between land cover and soil texture with respect to the dielectric...

Local climate zone (LCZ) maps are increasingly being used to help understand and model the urban microclimate, but traditional land use/land cover map (LULC) accuracy assessment approaches do not convey the accuracy at which LCZ maps depict the local thermal environment. 17 types of LCZs exist, each having unique physical characteristics that...

With the advent of high-spatial resolution (HSR) satellite imagery, urban land use/land cover (LULC) mapping has become one of the most popular applications in remote sensing. Due to the importance of context information (e.g., size/shape/texture) for classifying urban LULC features, Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) techniques are...

Parks and other public green spaces (hereafter “urban green spaces”) provide many benefits to urban dwellers, but some residents receive few benefits due to a lack of urban green spaces nearby their home/workplace. Understanding spatial variations in urban green space accessibility is thus important for urban planning. As a case study, here we...

OpenStreetMap (OSM) has become one of the largest sources of volunteered geographic information (VGI), and the data is now used for a wide range of applications. A massively popular augmented reality game, Pokémon GO, recently adopted OSM data for its in-game map and many of its in-game mechanics. This study investigated: (1) How Pokémon GO...

Deep learning (DL) algorithms have seen a massive rise in popularity for remote-sensing image analysis over the past few years. In this study, the major DL concepts pertinent to remote-sensing are introduced, and more than 200 publications in this field, most of which were published during the last two years, are reviewed and analyzed. Initially, a...