热带与亚热带拥有大量丰富的自然资源，同时也正在经历着快速的城市化进程，其资源、生态、环境等都面临着前所未有的挑战。同时，热带与亚热带地区存在着大量的自然灾害（如台风、干旱、地震等），威胁着该地区人类经济社会的可持续发展。应用遥感技术对热带与亚热带区域进行全面的监测，对于热带与亚热带区域甚至全球的可持续发展具有重要的意义。然而，由于热带与亚热带特殊的地理条件（如多云多雨等），遥感监测需要克服特殊的技术挑战。本文通过Web of Science核心数据库的7594篇研究论文进行分析，综述了热带与亚热带遥感的研究现状，分别从热带与亚热带遥感的需求、现状、挑战和机遇，通过共被引文献分析和主题词频率分析，建立共被引文献网络和主题词网络，并通过非监督机器学习进行聚类，分别识别出22个共被引文献聚类和6个主题词聚类。通过对这些共被引文献类别和主题词类别的深入分析，本文总结了：（1）热带与亚热带遥感研究的主要监测对象，包括城市地表、热带雨林、红树林、珊瑚、热带草原、生物多样性和自然灾害；（2）热带与亚热带遥感主要采用的遥感技术，包括：遥感数据的选择和使用、遥感数据分析的方法、多云多雨的问题应对以及多源遥感技术。最后，从现代遥感技术的快速发展，本文从8个方面讨论热带与亚热带遥感面临的挑战和未来发展的机遇。

Tropical areas are located between the Tropic of Cancer where the sun can directly shine, while subtropical areas are roughly between 40° North and South and the Tropic of Cancer (23° 26 min North and South). The tropical and subtropical regions have rich natural resources while undergoing rapid urbanization. Thus, the ecology and environment in these regions are facing unprecedented challenges. Meanwhile, a large number of natural disasters (e.g., typhoons, droughts, and earthquakes) occur in tropical and subtropical regions, and they threaten the sustainable development of human society and the economy in these areas. The application of remote sensing technologies to comprehensively monitor the tropical and subtropical regions is important to the sustainable development of these areas and even the world. However, remote sensing monitoring needs to overcome special challenges due to the complex geographic conditions of tropical and subtropical regions (e.g., cloudy and rainy throughout the year).This review analyzed 7594 research papers from the Web of Science Core Database and summarizes the state of the art of tropical and subtropical remote sensing, including the demand, status, challenges, and opportunities of tropical and subtropical remote sensing. The techniques of co-citation analysis and term frequency analysis were applied by investigating the clustering characteristics and patterns of the 7594 papers through their lists of references and the frequent terms in the title, abstracts, and keywords. A co-citation relationship network and a term frequency network were established to identify the clusters of research by unsupervised machine learning methods.A total of 22 co-citation clusters and 6 subject clusters were identified. Through an in-depth analysis of these categories, this study summarized (1) the major application topics of tropical and subtropical remote sensing, including urban land surface, tropical rain forest, mangrove, coral, tropical grassland, biodiversity, and natural disasters; and (2) the main remote sensing technologies used in tropical and subtropical regions, including selection of remote sensing data, remote sensing data analysis techniques, solutions to overcome cloud contaminations, and multi-source remote sensing technologies.From the rapid development of modern remote sensing technologies, this study discusses the challenges and future opportunities of tropical and subtropical remote sensing from eight different aspects. (1) Cloud detection, cloud restoration, and sub-pixel unmixing technologies promote the better applications of optical remote sensing in tropical and subtropical areas. (2) Multi-source and -modal fusion technology will bring new opportunities to overcome the problem of cloud contaminations in tropical and subtropical regions with the increasing availability of SAR remote sensing data. (3) Long time-series fusion technology can be used to monitor the tropical and subtropical regions with high temporal resolution and medium-to-high spatial resolution images. (4) New-generation observation satellites from China, Europe, Japan, and United States, as well as aerial remote sensing and UAV platforms, have provided great opportunities. Cloud computing platforms facilitate a long-term comprehensive analysis of full-coverage datasets in tropical and subtropical regions. (5) The in-depth application of tropical and subtropical remote sensing promotes the formation of a more comprehensive interdisciplinary method in Earth system science and sustainable development.