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The Mekong Basin in Southeast Asia is one of the largest international river basins in the world. Its abundant natural resources are shared by six riparian countries and provide the basis for the livelihoods of more than 75 million people. However, ongoing socio-economic growth and related anthropogenic interventions impact the region's ecosystems, and there is an urgent need for the monitoring of the basin's land surface dynamics. Remote sensing has evolved as a key tool for this task, allowing for up-to-date analyses and regular monitoring of environmental dynamics beyond physical or political boundaries and at various temporal and spatial scales. Remote Sensing the Mekong serves as a forum for remote-sensing scientists with an interest in the Mekong River Basin to present their recent basin-related works as well as applied case studies of the region. A broad range of sensors from high to medium resolution, and from multispectral to SAR systems, are applied, covering topics such as land cover/land use classification and comparison, time series analyses of climate variables, vegetation structure and vegetation productivity, as well as studies on flood mapping or water turbidity monitoring. Remote Sensing the Mekong was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Remote Sensing.
1. Preface: Remote sensing the Mekong
Claudia Kuenzer
2. Comparing global land-cover products – implications for geoscience applications: an investigation for the trans-boundary Mekong Basin
Claudia Kuenzer, Patrick Leinenkugel, Matthias Vollmuth, and Stefan Dech
3. Land-surface temperature dynamics in the Upper Mekong Basin derived from MODIS time series
C.M. Frey and C. Kuenzer
4. Sensitivity analysis for predicting continuous fields of tree-cover and fractional land-cover distributions in cloud-prone areas
Patrick Leinenkugel, Michel L. Wolters, Claudia Kuenzer, Natascha Oppelt, and Stefan Dech
5. Recent climate variability and its impact on precipitation, temperature, and vegetation dynamics in the Lancang River headwater area of China
Chong Huang, Yafei Li, Gaohuan Liu, Hailong Zhang, and Qingsheng Liu
6. Drought impact on vegetation productivity in the Lower Mekong Basin
Binghua Zhang, Li Zhang, Huadong Guo, Patrick Leinenkugel, Yu Zhou, Li Li, and Qian Shen
7. Suitability of SAR imagery for automatic flood mapping in the Lower Mekong Basin
Felix Greifeneder, Wolfgang Wagner, Daniel Sabel, and Vahid Naeimi
8. Ecosystem assessment in the Tonle Sap Lake region of Cambodia using RADARSAT-2 Wide Fine-mode SAR data
Lu Zhang, Huadong Guo, Xinwu Li, and Liyan Wang
9. The Ha Tien Plain – wetland monitoring using remote-sensing techniques
Tim Funkenberg, Tran Thai Binh, Florian Moder, and Stefan Dech
10. Operational multi-sensor monitoring of turbidity for the entire Mekong Delta
Thomas Heege, Viacheslav Kiselev, Magnus Wettle, and Nguyen Nghia Hung
Claudia Kuenzer is Head of the 'Land Surface' Department in the Earth Observation Centre at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). She has led several research projects on the Mekong region and published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and a book on the Mekong Delta.
Patrick Leinenkugel is Vice-Head of the 'Land Surface Dynamics' team in the Earth Observation Centre at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). He has contributed to multiple research initiatives in the Mekong Basin and has published several remote sensing studies for the region.
Stefan Dech is Director of DLR's German Remote Sensing Data Center, and University Professor and holder of the endowed chair in remote sensing in the Department of Geography at Julius Maximilian University, Germany. He has co-authored numerous Mekong-related papers.
