The monitoring of winter wheat Fusarium head blight via rapid and non-destructive measures is important for agricultural production and disease control. Images of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are particularly suitable for the monitoring of wheat diseases because they feature high spatial resolution and flexible acquisition time. This study evaluated the potential to monitor Fusarium head blight via UAV hyperspectral imagery. The field site investigated by this study is located in Lujiang County, Anhui Province, China. The hyperspectral UAV images were acquired on 3 and 8 May 2019, when wheat was at the grain filling stage. Several features, including original spectral bands, vegetation indexes, and texture features, were extracted from these hyperspectral images. Based on these extracted features, univariate Fusarium monitoring models were developed, and backward feature selection was applied to filter these features. The backpropagation (BP) neural network was improved by integrating a simulated annealing algorithm in the experiment. A multivariate Fusarium head blight monitoring model was developed using the improved BP neural network. The results showed that bands in the red region provide important information for discriminating between wheat canopies that are either slightly or severely Fusarium-head-blight-infected. The modified chlorophyll absorption reflectance index performed best among all features, with an area under the curve and standard deviation of 1.0 and 0.0, respectively. Five commonly used methods were compared with this improved BP neural network. The results showed that the developed Fusarium head blight monitoring model achieved the highest overall accuracy of 98%. In addition, the difference between the producer accuracy and user accuracy of the improved BP neural network was smallest among all models, indicating that this model achieved better stability. These results demonstrate that hyperspectral images of UAVs can be used to monitor Fusarium head blight in winter wheat.

The rapid growth of remote sensing big data (RSBD) has attracted considerable attention from both academia and industry. Despite the progress of computer technologies, conventional computing implementations have become technically inefficient for processing RSBD. Cloud computing is effective in activating and mining large-scale heterogeneous data and has been widely applied to RSBD over the past years. This study performs a technical review of cloud-based RSBD storage and computing from an interdisciplinary viewpoint of remote sensing and computer science. First, we elaborate on four critical technical challenges resulting from the scale expansion of RSBD applications, i.e. raster storage, metadata management, data homogeneity, and computing paradigms. Second, we introduce state-of-the-art cloud-based data management technologies for RSBD storage. The unit for manipulating remote sensing data has evolved due to the scale expansion and use of novel technologies, which we name the RSBD data model. Four data models are suggested, i.e. scenes, ARD, data cubes, and composite layers. Third, we summarize recent research on the application of various cloud-based parallel computing technologies to RSBD computing implementations. Finally, we categorize the architectures of mainstream RSBD platforms. This research provides a comprehensive review of the fundamental issues of RSBD for computing experts and remote sensing researchers.

Infected areas and damage levels due to crop pest and disease have been growing seriously according to the climate change. We aim to develop an automatic system to provide national pest and disease dynamic monitoring and early forecasting products, by integrating multi-source information (Earth Observation, meteorological, ecological, entomological and plant pathological, etc.) and cutting edge research on pest and disease modelling to support decision making in the sustainable management of pest and disease. Firstly, we selected the sensitive indexes for pest and disease habitat monitoring and early forecasting, and then optimized the forecasting model's parameters to enhance its applicability in national level. Secondly, we developed an automatic system based on WebGIS platform to efficiently realize the national pest and disease dynamic habitat monitoring and early forecasting. At last, we released the pest and disease forecasting thematic maps. China's national disease wheat yellow rust (Puccinia striiformis) and national pest oriental migratory locust (Locusta migratoria manilensis (Meyen)) are taking as the experimental objects. Based on the developed system, we forecasted the infected areas of rust and locust in China in 2019, with these R-square values are higher than 0.87. This system would not only promote the efficacy of pest and disease management and prevention by improving accuracy of monitoring and forecasting, but also help to reduce the amount of chemical pesticides, which could thus guarantee food security and agriculture sustainable development in China.

Light pollution, a phenomenon in which artificial nighttime light (NTL) changes the form of brightness and darkness in natural areas such as protected areas (PAs), has become a global concern due to its threat to global biodiversity. With ongoing global urbanization and climate change, the light pollution status in global PAs deserves attention for mitigation and adaptation. In this study, we developed a framework to evaluate the light pollution status in global PAs, using the global NTL time series data. First, we classified global PAs (30,624) into three pollution categories: non-polluted (5974), continuously polluted (8141), and discontinuously polluted (16,509), according to the time of occurrence of lit pixels in/around PAs from 1992 to 2018. Then, we explored the NTL intensity (e.g., digital numbers) and its trend in those polluted PAs and identified those hotspots of PAs at the global scale with consideration of global urbanization. Our study shows that global light pollution is mainly distributed within the range of 30°N and 60°N, including Europe, north America, and East Asia. Although the temporal trend of NTL intensity in global PAs is increasing, Japan and the United States of America (USA) have opposite trends due to the implementation of well-planned ecological conservation policies and declining population growth. For most polluted PAs, the lit pixels are close to their boundaries (i.e., less than 10 km), and the NTL in/around these lit areas has become stronger over the past decades. The identified hotspots of PAs (e.g., Europe, the USA, and East Asia) help support decisions on global biodiversity conservation, particularly with global urbanization and climate change.

Mass remote sensing data management and processing is currently one of the most important topics. In this study, we introduce ScienceEarth, a cluster-based data processing framework. The aim of ScienceEarth is to store, manage, and process large-scale remote sensing data in a cloud-based cluster-computing environment. The platform consists of the following three main parts: ScienceGeoData, ScienceGeoIndex, and ScienceGeoSpark. ScienceGeoData stores and manages remote sensing data. ScienceGeoIndex is an index and query system, a spatial index based on quad-tree and Hilbert curve which is combined for heterogeneous tiled remote sensing data that makes efficient data retrieval in ScienceGeoData. ScienceGeoSpark is an easy-to-use computing framework in which we use Apache Spark as the analytics engine for big remote sensing data processing. The result of tests proves that ScienceEarth can efficiently store, retrieve, and process remote sensing data. The results reveal ScienceEarth has the potential and capabilities of efficient big remote sensing data processing.