George Vosselman, Editor-in-Chief
ITC, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands 

Published issues
In the past year the journal published 68 papers in the six issues of volume 64, an increase of 42% compared to the 48 papers published in 2008. The total number of published pages was 696. This is 96 pages more that what is specified in the contract between ISPRS and Elsevier. As the ISPRS Journal is adopting time based publishing by the start of 2010, these pages were added to last years budget in order to reduce the queue of accepted papers waiting for publication (see the editorial of issue 1 of volume 65 for further information on time based publishing).

Theme issues
Two theme issues appeared in 2009. Theme issue 64/3 focussed on "Image analysis and image engineering in close range photogrammetry" and was edited by Hans-Gerd Maas and Thomas Luhmann. Issue 64/5 dealt with "Mapping with SAR - Techniques and Applications" and was edited by Andreas Reigber and Laurent Ferro-Famil. In preparation are theme issues on "Visualization and Exploration of Geospatial Data" (editors: Jochen Schiewe and Marguerite Madden) and "Scale, quality, and analysis aspects of city models" (editors: Monika Sester, Lars Harrie, and Alfred Stein) as well as a special issue to mark the 100 year anniversary of the ISPRS (editors: Norbert Pfeifer, Juha Hyyppä, and Helmut Mayer).

New associate editors
Early 2009 two new associate editors have been appointed to succeed Ling Bian. Qihao Weng (Indiana State University, U.S.A.) and Daniel Civco (University of Connecticut, U.S.A.) started on January 1st and February 1st respectively. The two new editors with a remote sensing application background allow a more balanced distribution of the manuscripts over the editors and a better match with the editors' areas of expertise.

Impact factor
The field impact factor for 2008 is 2.293. This corresponds to 211 citations in papers published in 2008 to the 92 papers published in 2006 and 2007. The impact factor of 2007 was 1.116. The total number of citations to articles in the ISPRS Journal increased from 769 in 2007 to 1235 in 2008. In terms of impact factor the ISPRS Journal is now ranked 3rd of the 15 remote sensing journals (previous year 7th out of 14). The acceptance rate of submissions to the ISPRS Journal was 35% in 2009.

Heleva Award
The U.V. Helava Award, sponsored by Elsevier B.V. and Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping, LLC, is the prestigious ISPRS Award for the best publication in the ISPRS Journal in a four year period between the congresses. For the years 2008-2011 the Helava Award Jury will determine the best paper of each year. These four best papers will compete for the Helava Award. The best paper award for 2008 (volume 63) was awarded to Helmut Grabner, Thuy Thi Nguyen, Barbara Gruber and Horst Bischof for their paper "On-line boosting-based car detection from aerial images".