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The twenty six papers in this special issue focus on the technologies of hyperspectral remote sensing (HRS)and imaging spectroscopy. HRS has emerged as a powerful tool to understand phenomena at local and global scales by virtue of imaging through a diverse range of platforms, including terrestrial in-situ imaging platforms, unmanned and manned aerial vehicles, and satellite platforms. By virtue of imaging over a wide range of spectral wavelengths, it is possible to characterize object specific properties very accurately. As a result, hyperspectral imaging (also known as imaging spectroscopy) has gained popularity for a wide variety of applications, including environment monitoring, precision agriculture, mineralogy, forestry, urban planning, and defense applications. The increased analysis capability comes at a cost—there are a variety of challenges that must be overcome for robust image analysis of such data, including high dimensionality, limited sample size for training supervised models, noise and atmospheric affects, mixed pixels, etc. The papers in this issue represent some of the recent developments in image analysis algorithms and unique applications of hyperspectral imaging data.

ispartof: JOURNAL OF INTEGRATIVE AGRICULTURE vol:20 issue:11 pages:IV-IV status: published

The main objective of the Belspo-funded LIMAMAL project was to support archaeologists in creating 3D terrain visualizations based on Lidar data and Pléiades stereoscopic imagery, and a combination or “fusion” thereof. A case study was developed to demonstrate the application of Pléiades imagery and light detection and ranging (lidar) technologies for prospection and visualization of the Mesoamerican archaeological landscape. Based on this case study, guidelines in English and Spanish have been developed to explain the technical processing. The project involved a stakeholder: the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), a Mexican federal government institution responsible for research, conservation, protection and spreading of knowledge on Mexican cultural heritage. The case study and guidelines were presented to the stakeholder and other interested parties during several meetings held during a short mission to Yucatan, Mexico in the spring of 2022.

A library for connecting a Belgian digital energy meter to your home automation system via MQTT. edition: v1.1 status: Published online

Advances in close-range and remote sensing technologies drive innovations in forest resource assessments and monitoring at varying scales. Data acquired with airborne and spaceborne platforms provide us with higher spatial resolution, more frequent coverage and increased spectral information. Recent developments in ground-based sensors have advanced three dimensional (3D) measurements, low-cost permanent systems and community-based monitoring of forests. The REDD+ mechanism has moved the remote sensing community in advancing and developing forest geospatial products which can be used by countries for the international reporting and national forest monitoring. However, there still is an urgent need to better understand the options and limitations of remote and close-range sensing techniques in the field of degradation and forest change assessment. This Special Issue contains 12 studies that provided insight into new advances in the field of remote sensing for forest management and REDD+. This includes developments into algorithm development using satellite data; synthetic aperture radar (SAR); airborne and terrestrial LiDAR; as well as forest reference emissions level (FREL) frameworks.

status: Published online

Internet of Things (IoT) allows physical environments to be connected to the Internet by means of billions or even, in the near future, trillions of IoT devices such as wireless sensors and actuators. This leads to exciting possibilities for a variety of application domains, such as smart metering, smart cities, smart buildings, smart mobility, smart health, and industrial automation. For realising IoT, Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs), a subset of Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) are important building blocks. Our research addresses the question of how to support efficient and reliable IoT-data communication in a context involving many types of devices, technologies, and services, integrated and operating under constrained conditions. We investigate the benefits of using open standard protocols for LLNs. The investigation of the state-of-the-art protocols for constrained IoT devices is done by conducting performance evaluation using simulation studies and testbed experiments, and while doing so, giving guidelines for designers and developers to improve network performance. We focus on the Routing Protocol for LLNs (RPL), an Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) compatible Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard. We highlight the design strengths of RPL and propose the design and implementation of three energy balancing routing metrics. Simulations show that our methods achieve better energy balance while keeping good energy efficiency and packet delivery ratio (PDR). We analyse the capabilities of RPL for Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning by enabling multi-instance (based on traffic classes) QoS routing. We also propose a QoS-aware cross-layer mechanism based on multi-instance RPL and carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) to enhance priority traffic in LLNs. The main purpose of the design is to increase the PDR as well as to reduce packet delivery latency (PDL) of high priority data. Our simulation results show the advantages of the design in terms of highly improved PDR and lower PDL in both hop-to-hop and end-to-end cases. To enable interoperability in the very fragmented IoT market, different integration platforms are emerging. oneM2M is one of such platforms that enables interoperability in two ways: by standardizing the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Message Queueing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) message format as transport vehicle for oneM2M primitives, or by including custom-developed Interworking Proxy Entities (IPEs). We proposed an architecture that enables horizontal integration of long-range low-power LoRa motes that run CoAP or MQTT on a full Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) stack in a oneM2M framework. OneM2M’s standardized bindings are used for interoperating these disparate application layer protocols as they allow to reduce the development time of an IoT application integrated in the Internet. However, they also cause extra overhead in terms of payload size. Our testbed results show that although oneM2M is a good interoperability enabler, a trade-off exists between ease of development/deployment and the amount of useful data that can be sent over LLNs. To integrate Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) based solutions running on constrained devices in a oneM2M framework, we develop an IPE including a DTLS server in OM2M, which is an open source implementation of oneM2M. By doing so, we enable security in this horizontal IoT framework aiming at interoperability. To show the validity of our work, we set up a second testbed to evaluate the performance of the constrained devices in terms of process

Characterizing the terrestrial carbon, water, and energy cycles depends strongly on a capacity to accurately reproduce the spatial and temporal dynamics of land surface evaporation. For this, and many other reasons, monitoring terrestrial evaporation across multiple space and time scales has been an area of focused research for a number of decades. Much of this activity has been supported by developments in satellite remote sensing, which have been leveraged to deliver new process insights, model development and methodological improvements. In this Special Issue, published contributions explored a range of research topics directed towards the enhanced estimation of terrestrial evaporation. Here we summarize these cutting-edge efforts and provide an overview of some of the state-of-the-art approaches for retrieving this key variable. Some perspectives on outstanding challenges, issues, and opportunities are also presented.