Forests provide a high potential for carbon management and are designed to enhance carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems. Forest change affects carbon flux through forest disturbance, management activities, growth, and restoration. These carbon flux estimates provide a basis for determining carbon credits critical to carbon trade and other tools needed to implement forest-based climate mitigation initiatives. Remote sensing provides essential data for forest carbon monitoring, supports the development of many algorithms and models, and plays a vital role in global and regional carbon management and assessment. Remote sensing combined with innovative and sophisticated methods or models is needed to calculate the amount of carbon in different pools and the fluxes between those pools. Several new remote sensing systems and free-access data have provided opportunities to support forest carbon monitoring.

Many physical and biogeochemical processes govern carbon dynamics. Forest field surveys can be used to measure forest carbon. Still, the study scale is limited, and the carbon assessment of forests and other land use types cannot be determined. Remote sensing provides a reliable data source for forest carbon monitoring, such as combining optical, microwave, lidar, etc. However, when forest changes and disturbances occur and land cover types change, new requirements are put forward for carbon assessment. Remote sensing cannot directly measure the carbon of different land use types. Still, it can provide data support for carbon assessment models such as process, statistical, and remote sensing. There are still many different opinions about the advantages of these methods or models. This research topic seeks high-quality articles to advance the field of forest carbon monitoring through the innovative use of remote sensing, potentially revolutionizing new approaches to climate mitigation.

This Research Topic welcomes interdisciplinary contributions where the critical role of remote sensing in forest carbon assessment is emphasized. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Forest cover mapping;

• Forest disturbance detection;

• Forest structure and biomass modelling;

• Carbon storage evaluation;

• Forest and climate impacts.

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Frontiers in Remote Sensing

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