Recent Advances in Land Remote Sensing: An Overview

Earth’s surface is undergoing rapid changes due to urbanization, industrialization and globalization. Environmental problems such as water shortages, desertification, soil depletion, greenhouse gas emissions warming the atmosphere, deforestation, elevated coastal waterway sediment and nutrient fluxes, among other environmental problems, are increasingly common and troubling consequences of human activities. Policy decisions about the environment rely on accurate and reliable information, especially data and understanding leading to better predictions of natural hazards, epidemics, impacts of energy choices, and climate variations. Comprehensive, systematic Earth observations are key to forecasting Earth system dynamics. Predicting future scenarios of our planet’s habitability requires analysis of what has transpired in the past along with observations of present conditions and processes. Timely, quality long-term global data acquired through remote sensing is essential for the ongoing viability and enhancement of human society on Earth. The field of remote sensing (Earth observation) has developed rapidly. Many publications have documented its progress (e.g., the special issue of Remote Sensing Reviews with a set of papers reviewing the modeling and inversion of surface bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) (Liang and Strahler, 2000), and the edited or authored books on similar subjects (Liang, 2004; Myneni and Ross, 1991). To systematically summarize the achievements of terrestrial remote sensing in recent years and to set the research agenda for the near future, the 9th International Symposium on Physical Measurements and Signatures in Remote Sensing (ISPMSRS), held in October 2005 in Beijing, organized three review panels. The papers compiled in this book are largely from these panels and are organized into three parts, respectively. Part I of the book (corresponding to the first panel, chaired by Drs. David Jupp and Tom Jackson, with Drs. Ralph Dubayah, Michael Schaepman, Jianchen Shi, Stephen Ungar, and David Le Vine) focuses on remote sensing systems and sensors. As there are many different remote sensing systems (the result of various