Geospatial technologies offer significant opportunities to address sustainability and resilience challenges by integrating Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and remote sensing with environmental science to tackle critical climate-related issues. With the accelerating impacts of rising global temperatures and extreme weather events, communities face increasing demands to manage vital resources, including water, energy, and land. The combined use of VGI and remote sensing holds great potential for generating actionable insights to inform sustainable development and climate adaptation.
VGI, exemplified by platforms such as OpenStreetMap, incorporates community-generated data enriched with semantic information and fine-grained spatial relationships. This provides localized insights into the accessibility, usage, and functionality of spaces, along with human perspectives, making it particularly valuable for context-specific analyses. Remote sensing, on the other hand, excels at delivering consistent, large-scale spatial coverage and systematic observations of environmental variables, enabling broad spatial and temporal analyses.
Together, these complementary data sources enable the retrieval and monitoring of critical climate indicators, resource management strategies, and solutions tailored to both large-scale and community-specific challenges. By combining the broad coverage of remote sensing with the localized detail of VGI, stakeholders can leverage these datasets to make informed decisions for climate resilience and sustainability efforts.
We invite contributions that explore the diverse applications of VGI, remote sensing, and their integration in fostering climate resilience and sustainability.
This special issue aims to advance geospatial research by exploring the integration of VGI and remote sensing into sustainability science and climate resilience frameworks. Submissions addressing novel methodologies, scalable frameworks, interdisciplinary applications, or the complementary strengths of these data sources are encouraged. By combining the capabilities of VGI and remote sensing, this issue seeks to inspire solutions for sustainable and climate-resilient environments. Submit a research paper now.
Topics of interest for this special issue include but are not restricted to:
- Combining VGI and remote sensing to analyze and assess infrastructure vulnerabilities to climate risks such as flooding, heatwaves, and storms.
- Multimodal data fusion through vision-language integration (e.g., visual remote sensing imagery with crowdsourced text) to enhance situational awareness, identify environmental vulnerabilities, and support climate resilience and disaster risk management.
- Enhancing climate-adaptive design strategies, such as optimizing the placement of green infrastructure and permeable surfaces, by integrating community-sourced geographic data with remote sensing-derived insights.
- Monitoring land use changes, vegetation cover, and other critical environmental indicators using both data sources to enable dynamic responses to climate shifts.
- Mapping, evaluating, and monitoring green spaces and green infrastructure—including tree canopy coverage, parks, and community gardens—using remote sensing and geospatial methods for insights on carbon sequestration, biodiversity preservation, climate resilience, and spatial patterns, complemented by VGI for ground-truthing and capturing local perspectives on accessibility, use, and ecosystem health.
- Supporting sustainable mobility planning by identifying optimal routes for low-emission transit, cycling infrastructure, and pedestrian-friendly pathways through VGI and geospatial analysis.
- Advancing disaster response and recovery efforts with real-time mapping of flood risks, evacuation routes, and resource allocation informed by both satellite data and community-sourced inputs.
- Extracting insights from street-view imagery, such as Mapillary, and combining them with remote sensing data to analyze heat resilience of buildings and urban environments.
- Shadow and solar exposure-aware routing applications to help pedestrians and cyclists choose cooler routes, enhancing thermal comfort and reducing heat stress.
- Estimating greenhouse gas emissions through spatial analysis of land use, transportation patterns, and community-reported data, enriched by the extensive coverage of remote sensing and the contextual detail of VGI.
- Developing citizen science projects and tools to engage communities in gathering data on local climate impacts and resilience strategies, complemented by remote sensing for broader spatial analysis.
Guest Editors:
Dr. Steffen Knoblauch
Heidelberg University
Germany
Dr. Hao Li
Technische Universität München
Germany
Prof. WenWen Li
Arizona State University
United States
Prof. Pedram Ghamisi
Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf
Germany
Dr. Benjamin Herfort
Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology
Germany
Prof. Alexander Zipf
Heidelberg University
Germany
Submission Guidelines/Instructions:
Please refer to the Author Guidelines to prepare your manuscript. When submitting your manuscript, please answer the question “Is this submission for a special issue?” by selecting the special issue title from the drop-down list.