Remote Sensing Applications in Coastal Areas

Coastal areas are regions of remarkable relevance for humans, providing essential components for social and economic development from the local to the national scale. At the same time, growing human and environmental pressures in coastal areas have contributed significantly to altering coastal ecosystem functioning. To preserve the economic and ecological sustainability of the coastal environment, the scientific community has been pushing for the use of integrated observation systems aimed at monitoring such susceptible areas. Remote sensing data can complement traditional field measurements, ensuring almost continuous synoptic coverage with a good trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution, thus allowing for a timely characterization of coastal environment dynamics. In particular, the availability of a multitemporal historical series of remote sensing data can provide useful information on the spatiotemporal variability of hydrological (sea surface currents, river runoff/discharge), biological (phytoplankton blooms, primary productivity) and physical (temperature, salinity, and turbidity) properties of coastal waters as well as on human-induced land cover mutations (deforestation, surface urban islands). This Special Issue seeks to collect high-quality papers focused on satellite-based applications for monitoring coastal areas, continental shelves, and estuarine ecosystems. Specifically, it aims to address challenges related to assessing water quality and bathymetric coastal mapping, or to identify processes in shallow and open waters, ecological threats for the ecosystem biodiversity, or rapid geomorphological or urban changes in newly developed coastal areas. All the above-mentioned topics highlight the need to develop innovative methodologies of data analysis that are able to handle multimission and multisource remote sensing data, fostering the implementation of integrated and sustainable approaches. The contents and findings of each paper published in the Special Issue on "Remote Sensing Applications in Coastal Areas" are briefly summarized in the following section.