The year 2018 marks the 20th anniversary of the coining of the term ‘Digital Earth’ and also ten years since the International Journal of Digital Earth (IJDE) was inaugurated in 2008. With these important milestones in mind, I feel that it is worth reviewing the academic achievements that have been made and the developments that have taken place in the field of Digital Earth.
The articles that have been featured in the IJDE reflect the vast range of accomplishments that have been made in the past ten years in the field of Digital Earth. In the past ten years, the IJDE has received 1,707 submissions from 78 countries around the world and published 419 articles. The journal achieved an impact factor of 2.292 in 2017, with its highest rating being 3.291 in 2015. As a result, the IJDE has developed a good reputation in the Digital Earth community and related fields. The journal has become a flagship for the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) together with its international academic symposia and summits. All of these promote the development of Digital Earth worldwide and strongly support the international collaboration between the ISDE and other international organizations, especially its membership of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the International Council for Science (ICSU − now the International Science Council after its merger with the ISSC).
As we enter a new age, the field of Digital Earth has been charged with integrating the natural and social sciences in order to respond to the challenges of global sustainability, environmental change and the digital economic society. Especially, in the big data era, with the development of advanced technologies like cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence and of science policies such as the open data policy, the field of Digital Earth has been pushed to the forefront of new discoveries that support our understanding of the planet and our ability to live on it in a sustainable manner.
Against this background, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the IJDE’s sister journal − Big Earth Data − which is also published by Taylor & Francis. This journal aims to publish papers that deal with the massive amount of data detailing the Earth's environmental processes and the related changes that are occurring, as well as the interaction between humans and the Earth, and in this way to make discoveries and support innovations that will support Earth system science. Big Earth Data focuses on, but is not limited to, Earth observation, geography, geology, atmospheric science, marine science, geophysics and geochemistry. I welcome all of you to contribute to these two ISDE journals.
I am firm of the belief that the journal's good reputation and international influence stems from our authors’ high-quality contributions and expert reviewers’ inputs. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the publisher Taylor & Francis for their professional work on this journal, and also the editorial team of Changlin Wang, Zhen Liu and Linlin Guan for their excellent work. In particular, I extend my sincere thanks to the international editorial board members for the special role they have played over the past ten years and would like to mention those authors who have achieved a high Web of Science citation rate. To list a few, these include Mike Goodchild, John Townshend, Chaowei Yang, Joseph Sexton, Max Craglia, Shunlin Liang, Peng Gong, Mark Carroll and Dengsheng Lu. In addition, Professor John van Genderen is thanked for his kind contribution to the inauguration of this journal and his continuing assistance to its publication. Thanks to your contributions, the IJDE has accomplished much during the past ten years and I am sure that it will go from strength to strength in the future.