GIScience & Remote Sensing

Advances in Remote Sensing and GIScience for Urban Sustainability

Understanding and advancing urban sustainability involves the employment of a series of indicators measuring the performance of our urban systems, for example, environmental impacts to residents, the capability of disaster management, public resources allocation and efficiency, spatial accessibility, and economic growth.

Remote sensing and GIS provide tools and techniques to help us understand the complex urban system and offer insights for sustainable urban planning. Remote sensing continuously provides invaluable Earth Observation data covering fields of land use and land cover, climate and the environment, population and urban features, and so on. Models and techniques in GIS can help manipulate spatial data from heterogeneous sources, uncover spatial patterns, quantify spatial associations among factors, and thus support intelligent urban planning and emergency management.

This Article Collection encourages researchers across disciplines to promote the development of innovative remote sensing and GIScience methods within the scope of urban sustainability studies.

Article Collection key terms:

• Remote Sensing
• GIS
• Urban Sustainability
• Land–atmosphere Interaction
• Land Use Planning
• Spatial Planning and Decision-making

Article Collection Guest Advisors:

Professor Wei Wei is a professor at the Northwest Normal University in China. He obtained his PhD from Lanzhou University in 2018 and was mainly engaged in research on optimal allocation of land and urban resources in arid areas. He is interested in land use change, urban resource optimization allocation, drought monitoring by remote sensing, carbon sink potential assessment by remote sensing, natural resource monitoring and evaluation in arid areas by using remote sensing and GIS technology. He has led multiple research projects into river basin governance and drought monitoring by remote sensing.

Professor Elif Sertel has, since 2016, been professor at the Geomatics Engineering Department of Istanbul Technical University. She conducted her PhD dissertation work at Rutgers University, the USA, as a Fulbright Scholar and investigated the impacts of land cover change on regional climate. She was a post-doctoral researcher at Rutgers University in 2008 and explored the effects of water table dynamics on the regional climate.She held the Director position at Istanbul Technical University - Center for Satellite Communications and Remote Sensing (ITU-CSCRS) between 2012 and 2021, where she was the Vice-Director between 2009 and 2012. Her research focuses on the application of geospatial technologies, namely Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), to solve environmental issues, generate decision support systems, understand the interactions between the land surface and climate and the impacts of humans on climate, primarily due to the land cover change caused by urbanization. For the last five years, she has mostly worked on deep learning, geospatial data analytics, and environmental problems such as soil salinity and droughts. She has extensively used geostatistical and spatial methods for the quantitative impact analyses of multidisciplinary applications, specifically in agriculture, forestry, and urban planning. Recently, she has also been researching the application of GeoAI to spatial challenges in the Digital Humanities. Prof. Sertel received the Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the Turkish Academy of Sciences in 2017 (TUBA-GEBIP) and the TUBITAK Incentive Award in Engineering from TUBITAK (The Scientific Research Council of Turkey) in 2021; the first scientist in Turkey to receive both awards in her field.

Dr Zehua Zhang obtained his PhD degree with Chancellor’s Commendation from Curtin University in 2023 and was awarded 2023 Humanities Greg Crombie Postgraduate Work of the Year Award. He is a spatial data scientist working on nationwide collaborative research projects with Curtin University and UNSW City Futures Research Center. He is also a sessional academic for coursework units under the Department of Geography, and Construction Management, Curtin University. His research interests include spatial statistics, spatial data science, GIS and transport and population geography. His works of representative include: "Geocomplexity explains spatial errors", and "On ignoring the heterogeneity in spatial autocorrelation".

Dr Lingbo Liu is a Research Associate at the Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University, where he leads the Spatial Data Lab project. The lab focuses on developing advanced geospatial models and an open-source visual programming platform to drive GeoAI research and offers training programs to make geospatial data science more accessible.  Before join CGA, He was previously a lecturer in the Department of Urban Planning, School of Urban Design, Wuhan University. His research centers on advancing healthy cities by applying geospatial AI models to analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban systems. His work aims to parse the coupling mechanisms of the space-human system, providing data-driven insights to support public policies that promote healthier urban environments.

Dr Siqin (Sisi) Wang, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Spatial Sciences with the Spatial Sciences Institute in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California. Dr. Wang’s research interests are in GIScience, spatiotemporal big data analytics, computational social science, digital health geography, human-centered GeoAI, human mobility and migration, smart cities and human-climate interactions and she publishes extensively in these areas. Prior to joining the USC Spatial Sciences Institute, Dr. Wang was an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, and an Honorary Lecturer/Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia. From April 2022 to July 2023, she also was a JSPS Research Fellow with the University of Tokyo, Japan, researching healthcare access and social vulnerability in the post-COVID Japan.

­­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 (unless they are an Editorial Board member).

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

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is 15 December 2025.

Please contact Alex Johnson at alex.johnson@tandf.co.uk with any queries and discount codes regarding this Article Collection.

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

The Guest Advisors for this Article Collection have declared no conflict of interests