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EDITOR'S PREFACE 
The close technical and personal relations between Commission VII 
of the International Society for Photogrammetry and the Subject 
Group Remote Sensing of the International Union of Forestry 
Research Organizations led to the decision for a joint symposium 
on remote sensing to be held in 1978. As location for this 
meeting Freiburg in the Federal Republic of Germany had been 
chosen, after Banff/Canada for the previous Symposium of Commissio: 
VII in 1974 and Oslo/Norway for that of the IUFRO group in 1976. 
The title of the 1978 symposium 
REMOTE SENSING FOR OBSERVATION AND INVENTORY 
OF EARTH RESOURCES AND THE ENDANGERED ENVIRONMENT 
expresses the intention of the organizers to focus on problems 
having a large economical impact to the human future. The ex- 
perience of a limited availability of resources and the need for 
an effective control of man-made environmental changes are a 
challenge to the remote sensing community to demonstrate the 
capability of this technique to contribute to the solution of 
these problems. The world-wide response to this symposium as 
documented by the unexpected large number of papers presented 
at the conference should be considered as a proof for the 
willingness to adopt this duty. 
The technical part of volume I of the proceedings begins with 
a review on the progress in photointerpretation and remote 
sensing during the last 25 years since the foundation of 
Commission VII of the ISP as well as an outlook on further 
developments, written by its first President R.N.COLWELL. This 
paper is followed by reports on the experiences of the seventies 
and important programs for the eighties. Volume I contains 
furthermore all contributions dealing with methods, systems 
and techniques which are of basic interest for the interpretation 
of remotely sensed data and being considerably important for the 
various fields of their application. The ties to other working 
fields within the ISP, particularly to Commissions I and III, 
are especially conspicuous in this volume. The volumes II and III 
comprise those presentations dealing mainly with the image and 
data analysis and interpretation for survey, inventory, moni- 
toring, planning, engineering and resources management. The pur- 
pose of publishing these proceedings is to provide a record of 
the actual state. Due to the remarkable success of the various 
programs carried out in the past and the promising activities 
planned for the future it seems to be justified to suppose a 
growing significance of remote sensing in a wide field of 
operational applications. The XIV Congress of the International 
Society for Photogrammetry to be held in Hamburg, Federal 
Republic of Germany, from July 13 to 25, 1980 will be a suitable 
occasion for presenting new results of the Commission work. 
The papers being published in the proceedings are with a few 
exceptions reproduced as received from the authors. Their 
allocation to the different chapters was not always unambiguously