Our Changing Planet: Half-a-Century Landscape Dynamics Observed From Space

About this Research Topic

Background

Next year, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the NASA-USGS Landsat mission, which provides the longest record of land observations over the globe at 30-m spatial resolution. The utility of Landsat data for time series analyses has increased tremendously during the past decade, once the data became freely available. Not far behind is the time series of the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) onboard each successive NOAA polar orbiter since 1978, providing 40+ years of systematic observations in the optical and infrared electromagnetic ranges. The AVHRR spatial resolution is much coarser than that of Landsat but the daily frequency of observations and the availability of free-of-charge data coverage over many regions made this time series most popular in the land research community studying ubiquitous landscape changes. MODIS onboard the NASA Terra and Aqua satellites and VIIRS on board Suomi-NPP, NOAA 20 and beyond, with more channels and higher spatial resolution, continued the legacy of AVHRR during the past two decades. The SPOT (Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre), a commercial satellite system initiated by the French Space Agency CNES, has produced a 35-yr long series of Landsat-like observations and 23 years of SPOT data compatible with that of AVHRR, with the archived data being available for regional analysis.

The aim of this Research Topic collection is to summarize recent advances in the use of the available long-term time series for studying changes of land surfaces over the globe at a spatial resolution between 10-30 meters and 1-5km during the period from the 1970s to present. The focus is on the optical and thermal infrared remote sensing measurements that have been organized into datasets that would provide new insights of regional changes in land surface variables and landscape dynamics stretching from the last two decades of the last century into present. Additional datasets with optical/IR and other measurements that cover more than a couple of decades, such as from geostationary satellites, time series of nightlight data or long-term microwave datasets, will be also considered if they satisfy the above constraints on spatial resolution.

Areas to be covered in this Research Topic will include:
• Improvements to the available long-term datasets
• Applications in all sectors of land-cover and land-use change (forests, urban, etc.)
• Novel methods in detecting land surface disturbances
• Validation of satellite-derived time series with in-situ time series of ground observations

Keywords: AVHRR, Landsat, MODIS, VIIRS, SPOT, landscape changes, long-term variability

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