GIScience & Remote Sensing

Remote Sensing Solutions for Urban Environment and Ecosystem Monitoring, Modelling, and Management

Cities cover approximately 0.5% of the global land surface, host more than 50% of the global population, and concentrate most global economic activities. Rapid urbanization and climate change have exerted increasing pressure on urban ecosystems, including urban heat island effects, environmental pollution, ecosystem function degradation, and public health risks. Therefore, developing evidence-based solutions for urban ecosystem sustainability has become a key research priority.

The high spatial heterogeneity of urban landscapes and frequent land surface changes impose strict requirements on the spatiotemporal resolution, thematic accuracy, and operational robustness of urban environmental monitoring and modelling. Remote sensing data from spaceborne, airborne and ground platforms, integrated with GIScience and artificial intelligence methods, is reshaping the paradigms for observing, analyzing, and simulating urban environmental processes, and provides scalable support for sustainable urban environment and ecosystem management.

This Article Collection focuses on the latest methodological progress and validated applications of remote sensing in urban environment and ecosystem research. We invite submissions of original research papers, review articles, and data notes covering thematic areas including but not limited to :

• High-precision fine-scale mapping and monitoring of urban green spaces
• Urban heat island dynamics and vegetation cooling effect modelling
• Multi-dimensional urban ecosystem biodiversity and ecosystem service assessment
• 3D urban environment modelling method development and validation
• Integrated remote sensing and GIS approaches for data-supported urban environmental design and spatial planning

Article Collection Guest Advisors

Qin Ma is a Professor at Nanjing Normal University. Her research focuses on vegetation remote sensing, including forest 3D structure monitoring, tree species mapping, ecological function assessment, and urban green space mapping and monitoring. She has led multiple national and international research projects, serves on editorial boards for The Innovation and Plant Phenomics, and has published over 40 papers in journals including Nature Communications and Scientific Data.

As an urban geographer, Yang Ju explores the interactions between socioeconomic status, the built environment, and population health. He is interested in: (1) mapping the built and socioeconomic environments of cities in historically data-sparse regions; (2) understanding how the built environment shapes disparities in residents' exposure to environmental hazards; and (3) analysing how the built environment influences public health through the lens of environmental justice and quasi-experimental research designs. He has served as a principal investigator for projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Education, and Nanjing University’s “Dengfeng” Fellowship. His research is featured in leading journals, including Nature Cities, Landscape and Urban Planning, and Cities.

Lu Liang is an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley whose research advances climate-resilient, healthy built environments through a "monitoring, mapping, and modeling" (3M) framework. Dr. Liang integrates multi-scale remote sensing, low-cost environmental sensing, and machine learning to address complex multi-hazard challenges across human-dominated landscapes.

Yimin Chen is a Professor and Head of the Department of Remote Sensing and Geoinformation Engineering at the School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University. His research focuses on urban computing and simulation, including fine-resolution urban land-use modelling, deep-learning approaches to three-dimensional evolution of urban form generation, and scenario simulations of urbanization consequences.

Further Information

­­All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo a full peer-review; the Guest Advisors for this Collection will not be handling the manuscripts.

Please review the journal scope and author submission instructions prior to submitting a manuscript.

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is 31 July 2027

Please contact Alex Johnson at alex.johnson@tandf.co.uk if you require further information about, or to request a discount code for this Article Collection 

Please be sure to select the appropriate Article Collection from the drop-down menu in the submission system.

Article Collection Key Terms

1. ‌Urban heat island‌
2. ‌Urban green space‌
3. ‌Urban ecosystem monitoring‌
4. 3D urban environment modelling
5. GIS for urban environmental management