Biography:  Hanqiu Xu graduated in Geology from Fuzhou University (FZU), China. He holds a Ph.D. in Geoscience from University College Cork, National University of Ireland. Dr. Xu is currently a Professor at the College of Environment and Resources (FZU), and Head of the Institute of Remote Sensing Information Engineering (FZU). He is a member of the Editorial Board of The Open Remote Sensing Journal (© BENTHAM OPEN), and Vice President of the Remote Sensing Society of Fujian Province, China. Professor Xu has been listed in International Educators of the Year for 2007 by International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, and in Marquis Who¡¯s Who in Science and Engineering, 9th and 11th Editions, respectively. His research interests include feature extraction from satellite imagery and remote sensing of urban heat island dynamics, where he has made significant contributions to the field of thematic feature extraction from remotely sensed imagery. He has proposed three remote sensing indices, Modified Normalised Difference Water Index (MNDWI), Indexed-based Built-up Land Index (IBI), and Normalised Difference Impervious Surface Index (NDISI), published in International Journal of Remote Sensing, and Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, respectively. The MNDWI has been widely applied in mapping or extracting open water features from satellite imagery since the publication. With the IBI and NDISI, he is able to reveal an exponential relationship between urban built-up land and land surface temperature, which was always thought to be a simple linear relationship.