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National monitoring of forests is essential for tracking progress towards various global environmental goals, including those of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Paris Agreement. Inconsistent national definitions of “forest”, however, can complicate the tracking of global progress towards achieving these goals. The FAO’s...

This dataset contains maps of forests and other land with tree cover in the Philippines as of the year 2020. The data can be downloaded directly here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dPdRbmPjTRJKtOuOa5s2lMXvIEcfhw-… The dataset contains three georeferenced maps: (1) A map of lands identified as "Open forest", "Closed forest", or...

Detailed Land-Use and Land-Cover (LULC) information is of pivotal importance in, e.g., urban/rural planning, disaster management, and climate change adaptation. Recently, Deep Learning (DL) has emerged as a paradigm shift for LULC classification. To date, little research has focused on using DL methods for LULC mapping in semi-arid regions, and...

Climate change and overpopulation have led to an increase in water demands worldwide. As a result, land subsidence due to groundwater extraction and water level decline is causing damage to communities in arid and semiarid regions. The agricultural plain of Samalghan in Iran has recently experienced wide areas of land subsidence, which is...

Forest ecosystems play an indispensable role in addressing various pressing sustainability and social-ecological challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss. However, global forest loss has been, and still is today, an important issue. Here, based on spatially explicit data, we show that over the past 60 years (1960–2019), the global...

Accurate urban morphology provided by Local Climate Zones (LCZ), a universal surface classification scheme, offers opportunities for studies of urban heat risk, urban ventilation, and transport planning. In recent years, researchers have attempted to generate LCZ maps worldwide with the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT). However...

River meandering and anabranching have become major problems in many large rivers that carry significant amounts of sediment worldwide. The morphodynamics of these rivers are complex due to the temporal variation of flows. However, the availability of remote sensing data and geographic information systems (GISs) provides the opportunity to analyze...

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are one of the most creative advances in Deep Learning (DL) in recent years. The Remote Sensing (RS) community has adopted GANs quickly, and reported successful use in a wide variety of applications. Given a sharp increase in research on GANs in the field of RS, there is a need for an in-depth review of the...

Illumination variations in non-atmospherically corrected high-resolution satellite (HRS) images acquired at different dates/times/locations pose a major challenge for large-area environmental mapping and monitoring. This problem is exacerbated in cases where a classification model is trained only on one image (and often limited training data) but...

The mass accumulation of population in the larger cities of India has led to accelerated and unprecedented peripheral urban expansion over the last few decades. This rapid peripheral growth is characterized by an uncontrolled, low density, fragmented and haphazard patchwork of development popularly known as urban sprawl. The Kolkata Metropolitan...