Our planet has experienced worldwide rapid urbanization over the past decades. With the growth of population and blooming of the economy in cities, numerous issues on sustainable urban development, such as air pollution, energy consumption, land degradation, urban heat island, have arisen. To mitigate and address these issues, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies are highly needed to understand the interactions and feedbacks of different components in cities for a comprehensive assessment. Earth Observations are one of the key data sources in these studies. There are many successful applications of Earth Observations, such as monitoring urban extent dynamics using remotely sensed optical images, measuring energy consumption in cities using nighttime light data, and mapping the three-dimensional (3D) urban form using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. Moreover, by combing emergent social sensing data, such as the point of interest, checking-in records, volunteer-based data (e.g., open street map), Earth Observations show great potential in answering scientific questions (e.g., anthropogenic heat flux and carbon emission) relevant to sustainable urban development.
This Special Issue welcomes manuscripts that demonstrate state-of-the-art approaches and applications relevant to sustainable urban development with the support of Earth Observations, in particular, at global and regional scales. Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:
- Monitoring and modeling of urban land use cover change using Earth observation data.
- Urban ecosystem response to the surrounding changing urban environment.
- Spatiotemporal patterns of urban energy use.
- Climate change mitigation and adaption in urban environments.
- Scale theory of urban evolution.
- Big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applications and case studies using Earth Observation data.
