Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are new platforms that have been increasingly used in the last few years for forestry applications that benefit from the added value of flexibility, low cost, reliability, autonomy, and capability of timely provision of high-resolution data. This special issue (SI) collects nine papers reporting research on different forestry applications using UAV imagery. The special issue covers seven Red-Green-Blue (RGB) sensor papers, three papers on multispectral imagery, and one further paper on hyperspectral data acquisition system. Several data processing and machine learning methods are presented. The special issue provides an overview regarding potential applications to provide forestry characteristics in a timely, cost-efficient way. With the fast development of sensors technology and image processing algorithms, the forestry potential applications will growing fast, but future work should consider the consistency and repeatability of these novel techniques.

中文翻译：

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特刊“无人机在林业上的应用”的社论

无人机（UAV）是近几年在林业应用中越来越多地使用的新平台，它受益于灵活性，低成本，可靠性，自主性和及时提供高分辨率数据的附加值。本期特刊（SI）收集了9篇使用UAV影像报告有关不同林业应用的研究的论文。特刊涵盖七篇红绿蓝（RGB）传感器论文，三篇有关多光谱图像的论文以及另一篇有关高光谱数据采集系统的论文。介绍了几种数据处理和机器学习方法。本期特刊概述了以及时，经济高效的方式提供林业特征的潜在应用。随着传感器技术和图像处理算法的快速发展，