Remote sensing-based detailed wetland classification: a review of advances from 2020 to 2025

Wetlands play an irreplaceable role in maintaining ecological balance and conserving biodiversity. However, driven by both natural and human factors, vast wetland areas worldwide are being rapidly converted into agricultural or urban land, leading to a sharp decline in their extent and a degradation of their quality. Against this backdrop, remote sensing technology, with its unique advantages in macro-level monitoring and multi-temporal dynamic capture, provides indispensable technical support for the precise identification, classification, and change detection of wetlands, making it an essential tool for wetland monitoring, restoration assessment, conservation planning, and SDG-related evaluation. This review examines recent advances in remote sensing for detailed wetland classification over the past 5 years. It elaborates on commonly used remote sensing data sources, local and international wetland classification standards, diverse classification methods, accuracy evaluation metrics, and prospects. This review provides a comprehensive reference to remote sensing-based wetland classification studies and applications.