Remote sensing as a tool for achieving and monitoring progress toward sustainability

Airborne and satellite remote sensing have enormous potential for facilitating and monitoring the dynamics of intergenerational natural resource management and built environment sustainability. Based on reviews of 1) the development and current state of the science for deploying remote sensing, and 2) capabilities and limitations of the array of archival and real-time remotely-sensed resources as tools for attaining and monitoring sustainability, we suggest several "Best Practices" for incorporating remote sensing within sustainability plans for selected rural and urban ecosystems. We present sustainability indices for case studies relating to sustainable forestry, agriculture, watersheds, and urbanizing areas, as well as a conceptual prototype for incorporating remotely sensed data within a general purpose decision support system that highlights the benefits of multi-temporal historical change detection in monitoring past and ongoing change, and in visualization of alternative future scenarios. Finally, we examine the sustainability of remote sensing technology, itself, with respect to economic pressures; public policy perturbations, systems resilience, biogenic factors and both inadvertent and deliberate anthropogenic impact.