The impetus for this special issue is the realization that we have three decades of experience in the use of remote sensing technologies in addressing many challenging environmental management issues, yet we remain short of our common goal to incorporate remote sensing into the mainstream of decision support. Islands of technical success using remote sensing exist amongst a sea of land management processes that use traditional sources of spatial information. Why do the managers and leaders entrusted with protecting our environment, managing land use, and accounting for our renewable and non-renewable resources still operate with out-of-date and inaccurate information? Why does the prowess of remote sensing, at a time of phenomenal digital information growth, remain entrenched in specialized fields of study, sequestered away from the mainstream of society’s decision makers? 

Perhaps it is because those of us who make up a society of remote sensing specialists have not effectively engaged the world’s decision-makers. Perhaps we haven’t walked a mile in their shoes and therefore part of this disconnect is our inability to communicate in the language of those who manage our lands and resources. With these thoughts in mind, we set out to provide readers with a set of papers focused on the decision making process needed by managers and then follow up with a description of the technology solutions for developing and effectively supporting these systems. These papers begin with the question “what decisions need to be made” and follow through with technical details to describe how remote sensing and enabling component technologies contribute to these important applications.

We offer this issue as a benchmark for future, more in–depth, articles to address the applications and component technologies that comprise effective decision support systems that are “engines” running on remote sensing data as “fuel.” The authors address their decision support system applications in the context of the components that enable the systems to be implemented in an operational environment. It is very encouraging to note that the applications range from agriculture (Campanella) to warfighter support (Agouris et al.). The range of enabling technologies includes airborne and spaceborne platforms with such remote sensing technologies as interferometric synthetic aperture radar (IFSAR) (Sanders et al.), thermal infrared imaging (Quattrochi et al.), and multispectral imaging systems (Franklin et al.). The authors emphasize the critical value of enabling component technologies, including the areas of semantics (Ram et al.), web-based delivery mechanisms (Sugumaran et al.), and multimedia presentation technologies (Arnold et al.). The integration of these technologies plays a critical role in enabling system-level solutions to be implemented on an operational basis. 

Perhaps the most important characteristic of each of the articles in this issue is a focus on the end goal of decision support for real issues that effect real people. The articles are not as “deep” in technical details as they are “broad” in addressing the range of remote sensing technologies and associated enabling technologies in the context of decision support systems. It is evident from the papers presented herein that mainstream use of remote sensing in our society is a “when” issue, not an “if” issue. The only affordable quantitative approach to measuring, mapping, monitoring, and modeling our local to global Earth resources for better land management is through the incorporation of remote sensing technologies. Today, remote sensing data are better and cheaper, the methodologies better understood and becoming standardized, the computational and networking vehicles for delivery of results are increasingly robust, and the communities benefiting from these innovations are ever expanding. So why haven’t the national and world’s leaders beaten a path to our door? As previously suggested, there may be significant value in learning to “talk the talk” the way the decision-makers do. To this end, we offer our approach in this special issue as a benchmark for our technical and scientific community to address the system level solutions for decision support. 

There is real value in making decision support a key focus for technical and scientific developments in remote sensing. Operational decision support requirements are complementary with, rather than competitive with, the scientific and technology development dimensions that have traditionally dominated remote sensing. Earth science will benefit from the challenging spatial information needs of managers. Research and development in new data sources, interoperability, infrastructure, standards, and widespread applications are all valuable to the process. Spatial information products derived from remote sensing used in decision support systems have meaning for those entrusted with managing our land resources (public or private) and protecting our environment. These systems will benefit us all.