Precision farming is an agricultural management system using global navigation satellite systems, geographic information systems, remote sensing, and data management systems for optimizing the use of nutrients, water, seed, pesticides and energy in heterogeneous field situations. This book provides extensive information on the state-of-the-art of research on precision crop protection and recent developments in site-specific application technologies for the management of weeds, arthropod pests, pathogens and nematodes. It gives the reader an up-to-date and in-depth review of both basic and applied research developments. The chapters discuss I) biology and epidemiology of pests, II) new sensor technologies, III) applications of multi-scale sensor systems, IV) sensor detection of pests in growing crops, V) spatial and non-spatial data management, VI) impact of pest heterogeneity and VII) precise mechanical and chemical pest control.

This book represents years of work by the ICA Spatial Data Standards Commission during the 1995-2003 ICA cycles.

It consists of an Introduction and six Regional Summary chapters that describe the spatial metadata activities happening in Europe, North America, Asia/Pacific, Latin America, Africa/Middle East, and the ISO community. These chapters provide the broader context and description of the milieu in which these standards operate, so that the reader can more easily understand the scientific and technical framework from whence a particular standard has emerged. The third section is a complete listing of all of the three levels of scientific and technical characteristics, and their meaning by the inclusion of a set of definitions for metadata terms used in the book. The fourth section, and by far the largest, contains 22 chapters that assess each of the major national and international spatial metadata standards in the world, and also contains a few representative subject matter profile derived from a major standard. They have been carried out in terms of all three levels of characteristics. Each assessment has been carried out by a Commission member who has been an active participant in the development of the standard being assessed in the native language of that standard. The fifth section contains a summary cross-table wall size summary chart that includes all 22 standards and profiles that are cross tabulated by 70 of the crucial characteristics. The columns provide a thumbnail sketch of each individual standard, while the rows facilitate a quick comparison of individual critical characteristics across all of the 22 standards and profiles. Many readers of our previous book have begun their standards evaluation process with this cross-table.

This current book on spatial metadata standards has been purposely designed to serve as a companion working volume to the 1997 book the Commission published on Spatial Data Transfer Standards, Moellering & Hogan, Editors, ISBN 008042433.
* Assesses the National and International Spatial Metadata Standards & Profiles in their native languages, and then reports the analysis in a scientifically consistent manner in a widely used scientific language (English).
* Provides a summary Crosstable of the 22 Spatial Metadata Standards/Profiles in a large wall-sized table highlighting 70 of the most important scientific characteristics
* Provides the scientific and technical detail for each of the 22 Standards/Profiles to 12 primary levels, 58 second levels, and about 278 tertiary levels. Scientific and technical characteristics can be used for a wide variety of uses with spatial metadata and associated standards

In this landmark publication, leading experts detail how remote sensing and related geospatial technologies can be used for coastal ecosystem assessment and management.

This book is divided into three major parts. In the first part several conceptual and technical issues of applying remote sensing and geospatial technologies in the coastal environment are examined. The second part showcases some of the latest developments in the use of remote sensing and geospatial technologies when characterizing coastal waters, submerged aquatic vegetation, benthic habitats, shorelines, coastal wetlands and watersheds. Finally, the last part demonstrates a watershed-wide synthetic approach that links upstream stressors with downstream responses for integrated coastal ecosystem assessment and management.

This book provides a practical, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the use of spatial statistics in epidemiology - the study of the incidence and distribution of diseases. Used appropriately, spatial analytical methods in conjunction with GIS and remotely sensed data can provide significant insights into the biological patterns and processes that underlie disease transmission. In turn, these can be used to understand and predict disease prevalence. This user-friendly text brings together the specialised and widely-dispersed literature on spatial analysis to make these methodological tools accessible to epidemiologists for the first time.
With its focus is on application rather than theory, Spatial Analysis in Epidemiology includes a wide range of examples taken from both medical (human) and veterinary (animal) disciplines, and describes both infectious diseases and non-infectious conditions. Furthermore, it provides worked examples of methodologies using a single data set from the same disease example throughout, and is structured to follow the logical sequence of description of spatial data, visualisation, exploration, modelling and decision support. This accessible text is aimed at graduate students and researchers dealing with spatial data in the fields of epidemiology (both medical and veterinary), ecology, zoology and parasitology, environmental science, geography and statistics.

This book presents a compendium of the urban layout maps of 2-mile square downtown areas of more than one hundred cities in developed and developing countries-all drawn at the same scale using high-resolution satellite images of Google Maps. The book also presents analytic studies using metric geometrical, topological (or network), and fractal measures of these maps. These analytic studies identify ordinaries, extremes, similarities, and differences in these maps; investigate the scaling properties of these maps; and develop precise descriptive categories, types and indicators for multidimensional comparative studies of these maps. The findings of these studies indicate that many geometric relations of the urban layouts of downtown areas follow regular patterns; that despite social, economic, and cultural differences among cities, the geometric measures of downtown areas in cities of developed and developing countries do not show significant differences; and that the geometric possibilities of urban layouts are vastly greater than those that have been realized so far in our cities.

This book presents a state-of-the-art overview of ongoing GIScience research that has been presented at the 10th Conference of the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories for Europe (AGILE), held in Aalborg, Denmark. Included are 27 fully peer-reviewed papers not only covering basic GIScience research themes, but also ongoing research on technological advancements, as well as applied research on environmental modeling and management.

Due to their unique geophysical and geodynamic environment, both the Arctic and Antarctic polar regions are often utilized for geodetic and geophysical observations. This book is a collection of papers on various aspects of the scientific investigation and observation techniques of the polar regions at both temporary and permanent observatories. Most papers focus on regional models based on data acquired in polar regions. Geodetic satellite positions systems (GNSS: GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO) will also be discussed as well as other space techniques (DORIS, VLBI). Gravimetry, absolute gravimetry, and tidal gravimetry are also discussed, as well as seismology and meteorology. The book also touches on data analysis and geodynamic interpretation and discusses methods of constructing autonomous observatories.

Currently, spatial analysis is becoming more important than ever because enormous volumes of spatial data are available from different sources, such as GPS, Remote Sensing, and others.

This book deals with spatial analysis and modelling. It provides a comprehensive discussion of spatial analysis, methods, and approaches related to human settlements and associated environment. Key contributions with empirical case studies from Iran, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, and Japan that apply spatial analysis including autocorrelation, fuzzy, voronoi, cellular automata, analytic hierarchy process, artificial neural network, spatial metrics, spatial statistics, regression, and remote sensing mapping techniques are compiled comprehensively. The core value of this book is a wide variety of results with state of the art discussion including empirical case studies.

It provides a milestone reference to students, researchers, planners, and other practitioners dealing the spatial problems on urban and regional issues.

We arepleased to announce that this book has been presented with the 2011 publishing award from the GIS Association of Japan.
We would like to congratulate the authors

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"Remote Sensing of Urban and Suburban Areas" provides instructors with a text reference that has a logical and easy-to-follow flow of topics around which they can structure the syllabi of their urban remote sensing courses. Topics have been chosen to bridge the gap between remote sensing and urban studies through a better understanding of the science that underlies both fields. In so doing, the book includes 17 chapters written by leading international experts in respected fields to provide a balanced coverage of fundamental issues in both remote sensing and urban studies. Emphasis is placed on: theoretical and practical issues in contemporary urban studies and remote sensing; the spectral, spatial and temporal requirements of remotely sensed data in relation to various urban phenomena; methods and techniques for analyzing and integrating remotely sensed data and image processing with geographic information systems to address urban problems; and examples of applications in which applying remote sensing to tackle urban problems is deemed useful and important.

Since the first symposium in 1984 the International Symposia on Spatial Data Handling (SDH) has become a major resource for recent advances in GIS research. The International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling is regarded as a premier international research forum for GIS. All papers are fully reviewed by an international program committee composed of experts in the field.

GPS and GNSS Technology in Geosciences offers an interdisciplinary approach to applying advances in GPS/GNSS technology for geoscience research and practice. As GPS/GNSS signals can be used to provide useful information about the Earth's surface characteristics and land surface composition, GPS equipment and services for commercial purposes continues to grow, thus resulting in new expectations and demands. This book provides case studies for a deeper understanding of the operation and principles of widely applied approaches and the benefits of the technology in everyday research and activities.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have developed rapidly in recent years and now provide powerful tools for the capture, manipulation, integration, interrogation, modelling, analysis and visualisation of data - tools that are already used for policy support in a wide range of areas at almost all geographic and administrative levels. This holds especially for emergency preparedness and health risk reduction, which are all essentially spatial problems. To date, however, many initiatives have remained disconnected and uncoordinated, leading to less powerful, less compatible and less widely implemented systems than might otherwise have been the case.
The important matters discussed here include the probabilistic nature of most environmental hazards and the semi-random factors that influence interactions between these and human exposures; the effects of temporal and spatial scales on hazard assessment and imputed risk; the effects of measurement error in risk estimation and the stratification of risks and their impacts according to socioeconomic characteristics; and the quantification of socioeconomic differences in vulnerability and susceptibility to environmental hazards.
GIS are powerful analytical tools in their own right, but what is needed is much more effective communication between the many disciplines, professions and stakeholders concerned - something which this book helps to achieve.

For the sixth consecutive year, the AGILE conference promoted the publication a book collecting high-level scientific contributions from unpublished fundamental scientific research.
The papers published in the AGILE 2012 LNG&C volume contribute substantially to Geographical Information Science developments and to the success of the 15th AGILE conference (Avignon, France, 24-27April, 2012) under the title 'Bridging the Geographic Information Sciences'. This year's conference emphasizes that geoinformation science, geomatics and spatial analysis are fields in which different disciplines, epistemologies and scientific cultures meet.
Indeed, the scientific articles published in this volume cover a wide diversity of GIScience related themes, including: Spatio-temporal Data Modelling and Visualisation; Spatial Data Infrastructures; Geo Web Services and Geo Semantic Web; Modelling and Management of Uncertainty; Spatio-temporal Data Quality and Metadata; Mobility of Persons, Objects and Systems, Transports and Flows; Spatial Analysis, Geostatistics, and Geo Information Retrieval; Modelling and Spatial Analysis of Urban Dynamics, Urban GIS; GIS and Spatial Analysis for Global Change Modelling, Impact on Space; and Geographic Information Science: links with other disciplines and people.

Geomatics, the handling and processing of information and data about the Earth, is one geoscience discipline that has seen major changes in the last decade, as mapping and observation systems become ever more sensitive and sophisticated. This book is a unique and in-depth survey of the field, which has a central role to play in tackling a host of environmental issues faced by society. Covering all three strands of geomatics - applications, information technology and surveying - the chapters cover the history and background of the subject, the technology employed both to collect and disseminate data, and the varied applications to which geomatics can be put, including urban planning, assessment of biodiversity, disaster management and land administration. Relevant professionals, as well as students in a variety of disciplines such as geography and surveying, will find this book required reading.
This rapidly developing field uses increasingly complex and accurate systems. Today, technology enables us to capture geo-data in full 3D as well as to disseminate it via the Web at the speed of light. We are able to continuously image the world from space at resolutions of up to 50 cm. Airborne LiDAR (laser surveying) sensors can be combined with digital camera technology to produce geometrically correct images of the Earth's surface, while integrating these with large-scale topographic maps and terrestrial as well as aerial images to produce 3D cityscapes that computer users can explore from their desktops.

This thesis presents a groundbraking methodology for the radar international community. The detection approach introduced, namely perturbation analysis, is completey novel showing a remarkable capability of thinking outside the box. Perturbation analysis is able to push forward the performance limits of current algorithms, allowing the detection of targets smaller than the resolution cell and highly embedded in clutter. The methodology itself is extraordinary flexibe and has already been used in two other large projects, funded by the ESA (European Space Agency): M-POL for maritime surveillance, and DRAGON-2 for land classification with particular attention to forests. This book is a perfectly organised piece of work where every detail and perspective is taken into account in order to provide a comprehensive vision of the problems and solutions.

Although designed primarily for desktop mapping and analysis, Geographic Information Systems have, for some years, been coupled to other allied technologies. This coupling or integration has occurred for some time due to the limitations in commercially available systems. It has occurred in several areas including visualisation (virtual reality), simulation (pedestrian, urban modelling), data storage and management (distributed or Internet GIS) and decision support. The chapters of the book, written by an international group of experts examine several of these discrete areas, focussing on the use of GIS and the technology it has been allied to. "

This book contains a selection of papers from the 16th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH), the premier long-running forum in geographical information science. This collection offers readers exemplary contributions to geospatial scholarship and practice from the conference's 30th anniversary.

The Workshop Proceedings reflect problems of advanced geo-information science as far as they are specifically concerned with the maritime environment at large. The Proceedings incorporate papers presented by leading scientists researching in the considered professional area and by practitioners engaged in GIS and GIS applications development. They pay close attention to the problems of scientific and technological innovations and the ensuing opportunities to make seas safer and cleaner. Furthermore, they periodically measure the ground covered and new challenges with respect to economic and shipping trends as related to Artificial Intelligence; GIS ontologies; GIS data integration and modelling; Underwater acoustics; GIS data fusion; GIS and corporate information systems; GIS and real-time monitoring systems; GIS algorithms and computational issues; Novel and emerging marine GIS research areas; Monitoring of maritime terrorist threat; Maritime and environmental GIS; Navigation-based and maritime transportation GIS; Human factors in maritime GIS; Coastal and environmental GIS.

Rapid development of remote sensing technology in recent years has greatly increased availability of high-resolution satellite image data. However, detailed analysis of such large data sets also requires innovative new techniques in image and signal processing.

This important text/reference presents a comprehensive review of image processing methods, for the analysis of land use in residential areas. Combining a theoretical framework with highly practical applications, making use of both well-known methods and cutting-edge techniques in computer vision, the book describes a system for the effective detection of single houses and streets in very high resolution.

Topics and features: with a Foreword by Prof. Dr. Peter Reinartz of the German Aerospace Center; provides end-of-chapter summaries and review questions; presents a detailed review on remote sensing satellites; examines the multispectral information that can be obtained from satellite images, with a focus on vegetation and shadow-water indices; investigates methods for land-use classification, introducing precise graph theoretical measures over panchromatic images; addresses the problem of detecting residential regions; describes a house and street network-detection subsystem; concludes with a summary of the key ideas covered in the book.

This pioneering work on automated satellite and aerial image-understanding systems will be of great interest to researchers in both remote sensing and computer vision, highlighting the benefit of interdisciplinary collaboration between the two communities. Urban planners and policy makers will also find considerable value in the proposed system."

This book focuses on the modeling and management of spatial data in distributed systems. The authors have structured the contributions from internationally renowned researchers into four parts. The book offers researchers an excellent overview of the state-of-the-art in modeling and management of spatial data in distributed environments, while it may also be the basis of specialized courses on Web-based geographical information systems.

"Elsevier's Dictionary of Geographical Information Systems" contains 4,040 terms with about 1,700 cross-references that are commonly used in the theory and practice of geographical information systems. The terms were selected according to their significance or frequency of use. The terminology covers the areas of geoinformatics, geostatistics, computer cartography, geospatial databases, computer graphics, geodesy, photogrammetry, remote sensing, hardware and software for introduction, processing and visualization of geospatial data, etc. Geographical information systems are modern, widely distributed and strategic tools in many human activities (land survey and regulation, ecology, forestry, agronomy, demography, hydrology, urban planning, transport, etc.).

"Elsevier's Dictionary of Geographical Information Systems" will be a valuable tool for specialists, scientists and students and for everyone who is interested in this area.

This book provides a sound theoretical basis for the the different gravity field recovery methods and the numerics of satellite-to-satellite tracking data. It represents lectures given at the 'Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Autumn School' in Bad Honnef, Germany, October 4-9, 2015. The emphasis of the school was on providing a sound theoretical basis for the different gravity field recovery methods and the numerics of data analysis. The approaches covered here are the variational equations (classical approach), the acceleration approach and the energy balance approach, all of which are used for global gravity field recovery on the basis of satellite observations. The theory of parameter estimation in satellite gravimetry and concepts for orbit determination are also included. The book guides readers through a broad range of topics in satellite gravimetry, supplemented by the necessary theoretical background and numerical examples. While it provides a comprehensive overview for those readers who are already familiar with satellite gravity data processing, it also offers an essential reference guide for graduate and undergraduate students interested in this field.