State-of-the-Art in Land Cover Classification and Mapping
A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "Remote Sensing in Agriculture and Vegetation".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 February 2025 | Viewed by 28602
Special Issue Editors
Interests: geostatistics; remote rensing; digital terrain analysis; vegetation mapping; land cover
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: irrigation and drainage engineering; agricultural drought and water resource management; drought monitoring, mitigation, planning, and policy; risk and vulnerability management; remote sensing for drought monitoring and management; soil moisture and hydrologic/watershed modelling
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Land cover classification and mapping have seen great advances methodologically and technically, with continuing improvements in conceptualization, models and methods, remote sensing science and systems, instrumentation, computer algorithms, and implementations. However, due to complexity in semantics, scale, phenology, and other characteristics inherent to land cover, there remain many challenging issues. Certain cover types (e.g., vegetation) are more difficult to classify and map than others (e.g., water bodies). Inconsistency and variability are common, even for experienced image analysts. Scientific rigor, technical sophistication, higher accuracy, and cost-effectiveness are extremely important and much needed, as are guidelines and overviews of good practice in these aspects of practice.
This Special Issue (SI), amended from its earlier theme on vegetation classification and mapping, aims to bring together multidisciplinary scientists and specialists for concerted research on concepts, models, methods, algorithms, and practicalities concerning the classification and mapping of land cover. Strategic key research foci will be thoroughly discussed with the aim of identifying bottlenecks to breakthroughs. The SI will facilitate communications among researchers and practitioners on topics of mutual interest. Such topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Classification system, harmonization, interoperability, and standards;
- Semantics and thematic resolution;
- Conceptualization of land cover as fields vs. objects;
- Multi-resolution, proportional, and fuzzy representations of land cover;
- Models of scale and minimum mapping units (MMU);
- Upscaling and downscaling;
- Sampling design for reference data acquisition;
- Image interpretation, interpreter variability, consistency, and quality assurance;
- Training datasets for machine learning oriented for land cover mapping;
- Spectral, spatial, and temporal features and their informativeness;
- Phenology and time series analysis;
- Statistical vs. rule-based classification methods;
- Physics-informed and explainable machine learning in land cover classification and mapping;
- Fusion of sensors, data, features, and classifiers;
- Data cubes of existing land cover products and land cover primitives;
- Well targeted re-mapping of land cover;
- Accuracy metrics and assessments for pixels, classes, and all problem domains;
- Uncertainty characterization;
- Thematic and regional case studies of cropland, grassland, shrub, forest, wetland, impervious surfaces, water bodies, and other broad cover types;
- Best practice in land cover classification and mapping.
Prof. Dr. Jingxiong Zhang
Prof. Dr. Won-Ho Nam
Guest Editors
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.
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Keywords
- classification
- mapping
- classification systems
- land cover
- remote-sensing images
- scale
- resolution
- semantics
- spectral–spatial–temporal features
- phenology
- pattern analysis
- machine learning
- rule bases
- accuracy metrics and assessment
- uncertainty
- confusion matrix
- mixed pixels
- sampling
- reference samples
- image interpretation
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