GIScience & Remote Sensing

Remote Sensing Big Data: Data Collections Driving the Advance of Earth System Sciences

Advancements in remote sensing capabilities, combined with a growing number of Earth observational assets, provide unprecedented opportunities to generate novel datasets aimed at improving our understanding of Earth system processes. New, high-quality, freely available remote sensing datasets can help drive pathbreaking research, reproducibility, and innovation that empowers scientists to address pressing problems such as climate change and natural resource management and conservation. This Special Issue focuses on creating and disseminating novel datasets containing original information made publicly available to the scientific community.

This Article Collection intends to present new datasets that fill critical needs in Earth system science, including, but not limited to, high-resolution land cover maps, vegetation indices, and atmospheric measurements. Submissions may comprise multi-sensor or multitemporal datasets that integrate across varied platforms (satellite, airborne, UAV) that aid analysis of dynamic processes on earth or datasets that can be used to model important environmental properties, such as carbon fluxes or extreme weather events. Submissions should also aim to represent underrepresented regions and have better metadata to ensure global usability and reproducibility.

Through this Collection, we aim to further support open science by encouraging the publication of well-curated, open-access datasets. This article aims to stimulate cooperation, engage with reproducible research, and contribute to new approaches to solving global environmental problems by creating and sharing high-quality datasets.

Authors are required to upload their datasets(s) to an open-access public repository with a permanent DOI. The manuscript must include a DOI (and/or review link) and citation to the dataset in the “Data Availability” section to allow others to access and properly cite the dataset. Submissions should be descriptions of the dataset creation, their novel contributions to Earth system sciences, and potential usages.

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 31 October 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.