Dear Colleagues,

Coastal zones provide a home and other resources for a large part of the global population, while at the same time, they receive numerous anthropogenic and natural pressures. Unoccupied aerial systems (UASs) are increasingly gaining ground in coastal studies, covering an enormous number of diverse applications that assist in improving coastal management efforts. UASs offer a completely new aspect in the field of remote sensing, providing fast and low-cost datasets with high spatiotemporal resolution, suitable for imaging and reconstructing coastal features and processes at the landscape scale. UASs are currently used on a wide spectrum of cases, from mapping shallow bathymetry to characterizing intertidal ecosystems and monitoring onshore sediments and vegetation. Additionally, UASs are employed for identifying floating and onshore macroplastic pollution, monitoring coastal erosion and shoreline change, as well as for marine mammal and other macrofauna observations.

Considering that the catalogue of UAS coastal applications is never-ending, this SI is dedicated to highlighting novel UAS coastal applications from a wide range of research areas, indicatively data acquisition technology and sensor integration, development of algorithms for UAS image analysis, shallow bathymetry mapping, documentation of submerged archaeological sites, monitoring of coastal erosion and shoreline change, mapping of coastal and estuarine geomorphology, and monitoring of wildlife. Articles focusing on UASs for coastal zone management and mitigation of coastal pollution are particularly encouraged.

Topics

Technology and methods

• UAS sensor types for coastal observations (RGB, multispectral, hyperspectral)
• Integration with in situ measurements (e.g., sonar, grain-size, chemical)
• UAS image analysis techniques and algorithms
• 3D reconstruction of coastal features (submerged and onshore)
• Integration with satellite imagery

Broad applications

• Shallow bathymetry mapping
• Monitoring shoreline change
• Coastal erosion
• Coastal and estuarine geomorphology
• Mapping coastal ecosystems (onshore, intertidal, and subtidal)
• Documentation of submerged archaeological sites
• Wildlife tracking
• Imaging and monitoring of coastal pollution

Dr. Evangelos Alevizos
Dr. Konstantinos Topouzelis
Guest Editors

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• UAS
• drones
• multispectral
• hyperspectral
• lidar
• photogrammetry
• coastal zone mapping
• coastal modelling
• coastal ecology
• marine mammals
• underwater archaeology
• shallow bathymetry
• benthic ecology
• coastal pollution
• coastal geomorphology