A research team led by Professor Zhang Xiaoli from the College of Forestry at Beijing Forestry University has published a landmark review paper titled "Monitoring Forest Damage Caused by Pine Wilt Disease with Remote Sensing Technologies: A Review" in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine, a leading journal in the field with an impact factor of 16.4. This publication, the journal's first from BFU and the first comprehensive review on remote sensing for monitoring pine wilt disease, marks a milestone for progress in forest pest and disease research.

Pine wilt disease (PWD), often referred to as the "cancer of pine forests", is notorious for its rapid spread and devastating impact. Remote sensing technologies (RSTs) are crucial for monitoring PWD; however, challenges remain in accurately detecting early-stage infections and scattered outbreaks. This review adopts a remote sensing perspective to systematically summarize the biological characteristics and spectral features of PWD. It analyzes the advantages and limitations of ground-based unmanned aerial systems (UASs), and satellite remote sensing platforms in PWD monitoring. Existing studies suggest that multimodal and multiplatform collaborative observations may help mitigate background interference. Additionally, the review evaluates the performance of statistical methods, shallow machine learning, and deep learning algorithms in feature extraction and monitoring model development. Results indicate that integrating remote sensing spatiotemporal-spectral analysis with artificial intelligence (AI) and developing models driven by both data and biological mechanisms offer promising solutions to key monitoring challenges. This review aims to improve and optimize the selection of monitoring methods, contributing to global efforts to control this destructive forest disease.

Doctoral candidate Wang Geng is the first author of the paper, with Professor Zhang Xiaoli serving as the corresponding author. The research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 32471859)

Paper link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11154978

Written by Wang Geng
Translated and edited by Song He
Reviewed by Yu Yangyang