This report examines the scientific basis for the use of remotely sensed data, particularly Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), primarily for the assessment of land degradation at different scales and for a range of applications, including resilience of agro-ecosystems. Evidence is drawn from a wide range of investigations, primarily from the scientific peer-reviewed literature but also non-journal sources. The literature review has been corroborated by interviews with leading s...

Urban Remote Sensing is designed for upper level undergraduates, graduates, researchers and practitioners, and has a clear focus on the development of remote sensing technology for monitoring, synthesis and modeling in the urban environment. It covers four major areas: the use of high-resolution satellite imagery or alternative sources of image date (such as high-resolution SAR and LIDAR) for urban feature extraction; the development of improved image processing algorithms and tec...

A ground-up approach to explaining dynamic spatial modelling for an interdisciplinary audience.Across broad areas of the environmental and social sciences, simulation models are an important way to study systems inaccessible to scientific experimental and observational methods, and also an essential complement to those more conventional approaches. The contemporary research literature is teeming with abstract simulation models whose presentation is mathematically d...

These proceedings are aimed at researchers, industry / market operators and students from different backgrounds (scientific, engineering and humanistic) whose work is either focused on or affined to Location Based Services (LBS). It contributes to the following areas: positioning / indoor positioning, smart environments and spatial intelligence, spatiotemporal data acquisition, processing, and analysis, data mining and knowledge discovery, personalization and context-aware adaptation, LBS ...

This book presents outstanding chapter contributions on the Nasca culture in a variety of artistic expressions such as architecture, geoglyphs, ceramics, music, and textiles.The approach, based on the integration of science with archaeology and anthropology, sheds new light on the Nasca civilization. In particular the multidisciplinary character of the contributions and earth observation technologies provide new information on geoglyphs, the monumental ceremonial architecture of Ca...

This book is the product of an eponymous workshop, which took place in Erfurt in May, 2012, and which has since then been supplemented with four further contributions. The topics focus on the potential mapping of perceived urban space and spatial hierarchies as a consequence of social usage (undertaken by a variety of active participants) together with spatio-temporal changes as a result of factors such as demographic urban growth and decline. Historians, cartographers and geographers are ...

Geotechnologies and the Environment: Environmental Applications and Mana- ment presents an engaging and diverse array of physically-oriented GIScience applications that have been organized using four broad themes. While the book’s themes are by no means mutually exclusive, Hoalst-Pullen and Patterson provide an elegant overview of the eld that frames the collection’s subsequent thematic str- ture – Wilderness and Wildlife Response; Glaciers; Wetlands and Watersheds; and Human Health and th...

Cartography and geographic information (GI) are remarkably appropriate for the requirements of early warning (EW) and crisis management (CM). The use of geospatial technology has increased tremendously in the last years. ICT has changed from just using maps created in advance, to new approaches, allowing individuals (decision-makers) to use cartography interactively, on the basis of individual user's requirements. The new generation of cartographic visualizations based on standardisation, ...

The emphasis now placed on the concept of sediment cells as boundaries for coastal defence groups, and the development of SMPs, should help CPAs realise the importance of natural processes at the coast when designing defence and protection schemes. However, this will only be the case where defence groups exist, and where CPAs take up the challenge of developing SMPs. Coastal landscapes have been produced by the natural forces of wind, waves and tides, and many are nationally or internation...

This book brings together a representative set of Earth System Science (ESS) applications of the neural network (NN) technique. It examines a progression of atmospheric and oceanic problems, which, from the mathematical point of view, can be formulated as complex, multidimensional, and nonlinear mappings. It is shown that these problems can be solved utilizing a particular type of NN – the multilayer perceptron (MLP). This type of NN applications covers the majority of NN applications deve...

This volume is the result of an invited symposium titled "Integrated Land-Use and Environmental Models: A Survey of Current Applications and Research" that was held in October 2000 at Arizona State University. The idea for the symposium arose from a belief held by many academics that we are at the watershed of a new generation of models that are more dynamic, more pragmatic, more interdiscipli nary, and more amenable to collaborative decision making. Several academics and professionals eng...

Over the past decade, advances in sensor technology, processing algorithms, and computational capacity have taken remote sensing to a level where observations can be transformed into quantitative measurements, and the technology can be used in near real-time for mapping, monitoring and decision-making.For the third edition, this widely acclaimed book has been fully revised, enlarged and updated. It covers remote sensing in a wide range of optical, thermal, and microwave wavelengths...