Generally, geography describes the geographic space while cartography illustrates this space. Regrettably, however, the global space occupied by one of a vital natural resources – the tropical forest – is continuously decreasing through deforestation and forest degradation activities. Such scenarios possibly creates the following listed impacts: First, when tropical forests are cleared, wet seasons come later, and less water is available in the landscape for evaporation and transpiration, thus suppressing rainfall. Second, forest depletion reduces forest related services such as food, biodiversity, soil improvement and climate amelioration. Lastly, third, tropical deforestation increases the rate of climate change. Consequently, climate change is already causes serious threats to human societies and it is negatively impacting ecosystems. 

In the arena of exacerbating climate crisis and increased attention to anthropogenic exploitations of forest resource, the international community has mobilized on several fronts to deal with climate change impacts through the framework on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) which encourages tropical countries to routinely monitor, report and verify (MRV) the status of their forest areas.  Remote sensing technology has proven high capability to monitor changes in forest landscapes on a global scale by applying satellite imagery with low spatial resolution but delivering daily global coverage; and also at national and subnational scales using high spatial resolution remotely sensed data. The component of national and subnational scale forest monitoring is usually problematic to researchers living in developing countries, because of the high financial costs for acquiring commercial high resolution imagery and software. Usually, acquisition costs of high resolution commercial remote sensing data for local scale forest monitoring are mostly in thousands of US Dollars (USD) or Euros in comparison to poor rates of national currencies in developing countries where many people are said to ‘live on less than a USD’, per day. 

Based on the foregoing assertions, we would like to dedicate this Special Issue to documenting novel open-source remote sensing-based methods for tropical forest ecosystem health and eco-benefits assessments that can help young and experienced researchers and scientists overcome the issues of not having been able to acquire remotely sensed data and software for forest health and co-benefits studies. Communicating such innovative research outcomes would contribute to supporting the formulation, monitoring and adjustment of national and sub-national level policies relating to sustainable forestry management and promotion of sustainable development policies in tropical regions of the world.

Therefore, we invite original contributions from fresh MSc. graduates, PhD students, service providers, remote sensing experts and geographic information scientists in the academia, government and the private sectors; to send in well-prepared, unpublished submissions that offer viable contributions to knowledge using available open-source geospatial datasets, software, data-platforms and data-based analytics  towards enhancing tropical forest health  monitoring and eco-benefits valuation in developing tropical countries for attainments of the core REDD+ objectives by 2030 and beyond.