Accurate surveying and mapping of islands and reefs has been an important field in Marine Geodesy. Theory, methodologies, and technologies for accurately acquiring the geo-information of islands and reefs have been further developed, especially for remote locations. The major challenges involved include the land-sea geodetic datum unification, coastal geoid determination, island sensing, coastline extraction and seamless cartography of coastal zones.
This special issue reports the most recent advances in research on islands and reefs. It contains eight research articles: five submitted for the special issue and three in the same field but submitted for regular issues.
The first article is on the establishment and application of a local tide model CST1 of China. The next three articles concentrate on geo-information data acquisition in coastal areas. Developments of shipborne multi-sensor mobile surveying systems for precise positioning and seamlessly surveying and mapping of an island and its surroundings are presented. The next two articles focus on regional geoid modeling using heterogeneous gravity datasets. One of them covers the gravimetric quasigeoid determination in the coastal areas of mainland China, and the other is about the geoid computation over Hong Kong, China. Monitoring technologies for detecting island land cover changes and alongshore sediment transport are discussed in the last two articles.
We would like to express our gratitude to all the reviewers. We are indebted to Prof. R. Li, the EIC of the journal, and the journal assistant, Mrs. Q. Lu. We appreciate the contributions made by all the authors.
We hope that this special issue will be useful to readers for their research relevant to island and reef surveying and mapping.