Foreword to the special issue on human settlement monitoring using multiple earth observation data

This special issue follows the very successful series of the Joint Urban Remote Sensing Events (JURSE), held every two years since 2005. The possibility to jointly use optical and radar VHR data, as well as different sensors from the same or related airborne and spaceborne platforms, at a level which may be regional or global according to the situation, open the path for more researches oriented to the analysis of multiple data for urban monitoring at different geographical scales. Submitted and selected papers include works on land cover/land use mapping using SAR and/or optical data in urban areas, monitoring land cover/land use and environmental changes in urban areas, change detection/feature extraction/data fusion for urban scene interpretation, human settlement monitoring and change modeling using remotely sensed data. They show recent research trends, and highlight primary keys to the future of urban remote sensing.