LAUSR

This special issue collects a selection of papers, developed from work originally presented at the Tercer Foro Nacional de Percepción Remota y SIG, the third Chilean national conference on remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS). The conference was held at Universidad de Concepcion, Concepción, in the Biobío Region, Chile, during 22–23 October 2015. The objective of the Chilean national remote sensing and GIS conferences is to gather applied researchers from universities across Chile to share the latest research findings and plan new initiatives. Given Chile’s geography, extending over several thousands of kilometres from the tropical desert of the Atacama to the subAntarctic tundra of Tierra del Fuego, national scientific meetings are a challenge to organize. This difficulty, however, makes the importance of regular meetings all the greater. The long-term aim of the organizers is, therefore, to build these conferences into a series of comprehensive events encompassing all aspects of not only remote sensing and GIS, but also allied field such as geodesy, cartography, and image processing. The papers selected for this special issue demonstrate the breadth of remote sensing carried out in Chile in recent years. The studies, summarized in the following, include work that focuses on all components of the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and the terrestrial earth, with a special emphasis on their interactions. All of the studies use multi-temporal data, either comparisons of single images or a time series of images, emphasizing the importance of the growing archive of remotely sensed data for addressing scientific questions in the context of climate change and a dynamic earth environment.