Remote sensing is a rapidly evolving discipline. Its progress is driven by advances in space technology, computer sciences, and the increasing demand for up-to-date geospatial information. This demand has in recent years been fuelled by major natural disasters and the predicted consequences of climate change and natural resource shortages. However, an important problem has been that many earth observation satellites have been designed as multi-purpose missions. These missions provided data for a diverse range of applications, yet they often did not serve any of them particularly well. Therefore the trend goes to specialised satellite missions designed to meet the requirements of one or few applications. This trend is accompanied by a specialisation in algorithm development for the retrieval of geophysical parameters and land cover classification, fusion of multiple data sources and intensified efforts in developing interfaces to ingest the remotely sensed data into models.
These fundamental remote sensing issues are at the heart of ISPRS Commission VII that deals with the thematic processing, modelling and analysis of remotely sensed data. The mission of Commission VII is to promote science and international cooperation in order to make new remotely sensed geospatial datasets available to users, exploiting existing satellite data archives and making best use of new remote sensing capabilities such as provided by new multi-spectral imagers, SAR satellites and lidar instruments.