The book introduces the topic of geochemical modeling of fluids in subsurface and hydrothermal systems. The intention is to serve as a textbook for graduate students in aqueous, environmental and groundwater geochemistry, despite the fact that its focus is on the special topic of geochemistry in hydrothermal systems, it also provides new insights for experienced researchers with respect to the topic of reactive transport. The overall purpose is to give the reader an understanding of the processes that control the chemical composition of waters in hydrothermal systems and to highlight the interfaces between chemistry, geothermics and hydrogeology.

From the reviews:

.."is a nice, compact introduction to the principles of modeling coupled fluid flow and fluid-mineral reactions in active geothermal systems, as used for heating and electricity generation." ( Christoph A. Heinrich, ECONOMIC GEOLOGY, June 2004)

The main activities of the economically active population around The Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl volcanoes region lie in the primary sector (65- 90%). Of the people working in this sector, those dependent on agricultural or pastoral activities generally have an income significantly lower than the minimum wage in Mexico. Of the activities in the area, these agricultural, pastoral, and forestry activities probably have the most direct effect on the ecology of the volcanoes and its immediate surroundings. Traditional farmers, producing crops such as beans, pumpkins and cucumbers, generally work on small fields using traditional methods and animal traction. Modern farming, geared towards intensive production develops on larger sites making use of modern machinery, fertilizers, and pesticides. As the area under agriculture continues to increase every year, the attendant opening of large forested areas, soil modification, and ensuing erosion make it almost impossible for forest recovery. Extensive forestry in the region mainly concerns cutting and collecting wood, cutting Pinus-branches for torches or for utensils for open-fire cooking, collection of mushrooms, and hunting. Although these (often clandestine) activities seem to be small-scale, their adverse effects on the forest have been substantial. Weekend visitors from Mexico City heavily dominate recreation, with tourism concentrated near the roads leading to and inside the park. Lacking organization and facilities, most recreational activities have had significant environmental impact on the area In many countries, the decline of nature has occurred because of changes in land use.

Regional development is intrinsically related to the way in which the land is used. Given the rising awareness of the multifunctionality of the world's land resources, policy makers now face the complex task of accommodating multiple objectives of an increasing number of stakeholders in regional development. This implies a need for tools that can be employed to provide insights into the opportunities and limitations of land use. Those tools should be capable of quantifying trade-offs between socio-economic, sustainability, and environment-related policy objectives.
This book offers a detailed account of a range of interdisciplinary methodologies for land use analysis, developed over a twelve-year period (1986-1998) in Costa Rica, through collaborative research between three institutions: one from the North (Wageningen Agricultural University of The Netherlands), and two from the South (the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center CATIE] and the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock MAG]). The methodologies span a number of spatial scales, ranging from the field level all the way to the national level. Concepts of systems analysis and information technology play a pivotal role in each of the methodologies. Together, they form a unique toolbox that deserves ample use in the process of agricultural policy design.
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The book is a new comprehensive textbook about creating and publishing geoinformation metadata. It is a compendium of knowledge about geoinformation metadata in INSPIRE Directive and Spatial Information Infrastructures. It contains the knowledge necessary to understand prior to the creation of geoinformation metadata. Metadata - "data about data" - describe the layers of spatial data (data series, services) responding to the questions: what?, why?, when?, who?, how? and where? Geoinformation metadata allows for exact search of the spatial data according to given criteria, regardless of where this data is located. On 15 May 2007 the EU Directive 2007/2/EC came into force establishing Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe - INSPIRE. The proper functioning of the infrastructure for spatial information would not be possible without the metadata.

This brief provides an overview of state-of-the-art sensing technologies relevant to the problem of precision irrigation, an emerging field within the domain of precision agriculture. Applications of wireless sensor networks, satellite data and geographic information systems in the domain are covered. This brief presents the basic concepts of the technologies and emphasizes the practical aspects that enable the implementation of intelligent irrigation systems. The authors target a broad audience interested in this theme and organize the content in five chapters, each concerned with a specific technology needed to address the problem of optimal crop irrigation. Professionals and researchers will find the text a thorough survey with practical applications.

Although the development of remote sensing techniques focuses greatly on construction of new sensors with higher spatial and spectral resolution, it is advisable to also use data of older sensors (especially, the LANDSAT-mission) when the historical mapping of land use/land cover and monitoring of their dynamics are needed. Using data from LANDSAT missions as well as from Terra (ASTER) Sensors, the authors shows in his book maps of historical land cover changes with a focus on agricultural irrigation projects.

The kernel of this study was whether, how and to what extent applying the various remotely sensed data that were used here, would be an effective approach to classify the historical and current land use/land cover, to monitor the dynamics of land use/land cover during the last four decades, to map the development of the irrigation areas, and to classify the major strategic winter- and summer-irrigated agricultural crops in the study area of the Euphrates River Basin.

For the seventh consecutive year, the AGILE promotes the publication of a book collecting high-level scientific papers from unpublished fundamental scientific research in the field of Geographic Information Science. As the agenda for Europe 2020 is currently being set, this book demonstrates how geographic information science is at the heart of Europe. The contributions open perspectives for innovative services that will strengthen our European economy, and which will inform citizens about their environment while preserving their privacy. The latest challenges of spatial data infrastructures are addressed, such as the connection with the Web vocabularies or the representation of genealogy. User generated data (through social networks or through interactive cameras and software) is also an important breakthrough in our domain. A trend to deal more and more with time, events, ancient data, a nd activities is noticeable this year as well. This volume collects the 23 best full papers presented during the 16th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, held between 14 and 17 May 2013 in Leuven, Belgium.

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."

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.

The Arctic sea ice is characterized by profound changes caused by surface melting processes and the formation of melt ponds in summer. Melt ponds contribute to the ice-albedo feedback as they reduce the surface albedo of sea ice, and hence accelerate the decay of Arctic sea ice. To quantify the melting of the entire Arctic sea ice, satellite based observations are necessary. Due to different spectral properties of snow, ice, and water, theoretically, multi-spectral optical sensors are necessary for the analysis of these distinct surface types. This study demonstrates the potential of optical sensors to detect melt ponds on Arctic sea ice. For the first time, an Arctic-wide, multi-annual melt pond data set for the years 2000-2011 has been created and analyzed.

This book introduces the overall concepts of research methods in Remote Sensing. It also addresses the entire research framework, ranging from ontology to documentation. As such, it covers the theory while providing a solid basis for engaging in concrete research activities. It is not intended as a textbook on remote sensing; rather, it offers guidance to those conducting research by examining philosophical and other issues that are generally not covered by textbooks. Various stages of research are discussed in detail, including illustrative discussions and helpful references. The topics considered in this book cover a part of the research methodologies explored in Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) programs.The book s physical format has been kept to a compact, handy minimum in order to maximize its accessibility and readability for a broad range of researchers in the field of remote sensing.

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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It has long been a dream to realize machines with flexible visual perception capability. Research on digital image processing by computers was initiated about 30 years ago, and since then a wide variety of image processing algorithms have been devised. Using such image processing algorithms and advanced hardware technologies, many practical ma chines with visual recognition capability have been implemented and are used in various fields: optical character readers and design chart readers in offices, position-sensing and inspection systems in factories, computer tomography and medical X-ray and microscope examination systems in hospitals, and so on. Although these machines are useful for specific tasks, their capabilities are limited. That is, they can analyze only simple images which are recorded under very carefully adjusted photographic conditions: objects to be recognized are isolated against a uniform background and under well-controlled artificial lighting. In the late 1970s, many image understanding systems were de veloped to study the automatic interpretation of complex natural scenes. They introduced artificial intelligence techniques to represent the knowl edge about scenes and to realize flexible control structures. The first author developed an automatic aerial photograph interpretation system based on the blackboard model (Naga1980). Although these systems could analyze fairly complex scenes, their capabilities were still limited; the types of recognizable objects were limited and various recognition vii viii Preface errors occurred due to noise and the imperfection of segmentation algorithms."

Spatially aware wireless and Internet devices, cloud computing, NoSal databases, social networks and semantic web offer new ways of accessing, analyzing, and elaborating geo-spatial information in both real-world and virtual spaces. This book explores the how-to's of the most promising recurrent technologies and trends in GIS, such as Semantic GIS, Web GIS, Mobile GIS, NoSal Geographic Databases, Cloud GIS, Geo Social networks, Spatial Data Warehousing-OlAP, and Open GIS. The text discusses and emphasizes the methodological aspects of such technologies and their applications in GIS.

Through the results of a developed case study of information system for low temperature geothermal energy, GIS to Support Cost-effective Decisions on Renewable Sources addresses the issue of the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in evaluating cost-effectiveness of renewable resource exploitation on a regional scale. Focusing on the design of a Decision Support System, a process is presented aimed to transform geographic data into knowledge useful for analysis and decision-making on the economic exploitation of geothermal energy. This detailed description includes a literature review and technical issues related to data collection, data mining, decision analysis for the informative system developed for the case study. A multi-disciplinary approach to GIS design is presented which is also an innovative example of fusion of georeferenced data acquired from multiple sources including remote sensing, networks of sensors and socio-economic censuses. GIS to Support Cost-effective Decisions on Renewable Sources is a useful, practical reference for engineers, managers and researchers involved in the design of GIS, decision support systems, investment planning/strategy in renewable energy and ICT innovation in this field.

People and the Environment: Approaches for Linking Household and Community Surveys to Remote Sensing and GIS appeals to a wide range of natural, social, and spatial scientists with interests in conducting population and environment research and thereby characterizing (a) land use and land cover dynamics through remote sensing, (b) demographic and socio-economic variables through household and community surveys, and (c) local site and situation through resource endowments, geographical accessibility, and connections of people to place through GIS. Case studies are used to examine theories and practices useful in linking people and the environment. We also describe land use and land cover dynamics and the associated social, biophysical, and geographical drivers of change articulated through human-environment interactions.

The book comprises innovative research presented at the 14th Conference of the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE), held in 2011 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The scientific papers cover a large variety of fundamental research topics as well as applied research in Geoinformation Science including measuring spatiotemporal phenomena, quality and semantics, spatiotemporal analysis, modeling and decision support as well as spatial information infrastructures. The book is aimed at researchers, practitioners and students who work in various fields and disciplines related to Geoinformation Science and technology.

"Sky Alert! What Happens When Satellites Fail" explores for the first time what our modern world would be like if we were suddenly to lose most, if not all, of our space assets. The author demonstrates humankind's dependence on space satellites and show what might happen to various aspects of our economy, defense, and daily lives if they were suddenly destroyed. The book opens with a consideration of how our space assets might be lost in the first place: through orbital debris, war, and solar storms. The author then looks at what would happen if our satellites were lost, including the effect on weather forecasting, and the Global Positioning System, explaining GPS in detail and its importance to the military, including spy satellites and military reconnaissance, commerce, civilians, communications and remote sensing - both resource monitoring and locating and environmental monitoring and science. The effects of losing such assets as the International Space Station as well as such research satellites as the Hubble Space Telescope or the Chandra X-Ray Observatory are also considered. Part III of the book looks at how we can protect our satellites, preparing for the worst, reducing the growth and amount of orbital debris, preventing acts of war in space and hardening against space radiation. The book ends on an optimistic note: most spacefaring nations are now working together to develop new technologies to reduce the threat posed by orbital debris and in-space nuclear detonations and treaties exist to limit the development and use of weapons in space. Finally, it is hoped that it will not be long before we will be able to better predict and take precautions against solar storms. The global economy has now become so dependent upon satellites that their loss would be devastating - to the economy, to national security, and potentially, to the day-to-day survival of those who live in the world's most advanced economies.

Mining Spatio-Temporal Information Systems, an edited volume is composed of chapters from leading experts in the field of Spatial-Temporal Information Systems and addresses the many issues in support of modeling, creation, querying, visualizing and mining. Mining Spatio-Temporal Information Systems is intended to bring together a coherent body of recent knowledge relating to STIS data modeling, design, implementation and STIS in knowledge discovery. In particular, the reader is exposed to the latest techniques for the practical design of STIS, essential for complex query processing. Mining Spatio-Temporal Information Systems is structured to meet the needs of practitioners and researchers in industry and graduate-level students in Computer Science.

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 12th International Symposium, W2GIS 2013, held in Banff, Canada, in April 2013. The 11 revised full papers and 5 short papers presented were carefully selected from 28 submissions. The program covers a wide range of topics including Spatial Semantics and Databases, Location-based Services and Applications, Trajectory Representation and Sensor Web, Spatial Analysis and Systems and Map Generation and Modeling.

Environmental Informatics (or Enviromatics) is a maturing subject with interdisciplinary roots in computer science, environmental planning, ecology, economics and other related areas. Its practitioners must be prepared to work with many diverse professional groups. It forms the foundation for computer-assisted environmental protection. This book contains an edited version of papers presented at the 3rd International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems (ISESS '99), which was held at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, from August 30 to September 2, 1999, and was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). The text is divided into six sections: * Enviromatics - Introduction; * Environmental Issues; * Environmental Information Systems - Tools and Techniques; * Environmental Information Systems - Implementations; * Environmental Decision Support Systems; * Specialised Topics. This state-of-the-art volume will be essential reading for computer scientists and engineers, ecologists, and environmental planners and managers.

A state-of-the-art view of recent developments in the use of artificial neural networks for analysing remotely sensed satellite data. Neural networks, as a new form of computational paradigm, appear well suited to many of the tasks involved in this image analysis. This book demonstrates a wide range of uses of neural networks for remote sensing applications and reports the views of a large number of European experts brought together as part of a concerted action supported by the European Commission.

Methods and Materials for Remote Sensing: Infrared Photo-Detectors, Radiometers and Arrays presents the basic principles and the guidelines for the design of IR and microwave radiometers intended for the detection of weak electromagnetic signals in a noisy background. Significant attention is paid in this book to the discussion of the origin of the noises and consideration of the physical factors limiting the sensitivity of photo sensors. The physico-chemical properties of narrow-band semiconductors, which are the basic photosensitive materials for the microwave and IR radiometry, are discussed. Also described are the methods for growing the single crystals, epitaxial films and arrays from solid solutions of these compounds for the application in photosensitive detectors. The main goal of Methods and Materials for Remote Sensing: Infrared Photo-Detectors, Radiometers and Arrays is to present the entire material from the unifying physical viewpoint, which will be helpful for the designers of photo-detecting devices, and professionals contributing in various areas of remote sensing.

This book, entitled Advances in Spatial Data Handling, is a compendium of papers resulting from the International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH), held in Ottawa, Canada, July 9-12, 2002. The SDH conference series has been organised as one of the main activities of the International Geographical Union (IGU) since it was first started in Zurich in 1984. In the late 1990's the IGU Commission of Geographic Information Systems was discontinued and a study group was formed to succeed it in 1997. Much like the IGU Commission, the objectives of the Study Group are to create a network of people and research centres addressing geographical information science and to facilitate exchange of information. The International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, which is the most important activity of the IGU Study Group, has, throughout its 18 year history been highly regarded as one of the most important GIS conferences in the world.

Over the last fifty years, humanity has developed an extraordinary global utility which is omnipresent, universal, and available to all: the Global Positioning System (GPS). A network of twenty-four satellites and their monitoring stations on Earth, it makes possible almost all modern technology, from the smartphone in your pocket to the Mars rover. Neither the internet nor the cloud would work without it. And it is changing us in profound ways we've yet to come to terms with. While GPS has brought us breathtakingly accurate methods of timekeeping, navigation, and earthquake tracking, our overwhelming reliance on it is having unexpected consequences on our culture, and on ourselves. GPS is reshaping our thinking about privacy and surveillance, and brings with it the growing danger of GPS terrorism. Neuroscientists have even found that using GPS for navigation may be affecting our cognitive maps - possibly rearranging the grey matter in our heads - leading to the increasingly common phenomenon 'Death by GPS', in which drivers blindly follow their devices into deserts, lakes, and impassable mountains. Deeply researched, inventive and with fascinating insights into the way we think about our place in the world, Pinpoint reveals the way that the technologies we design to help us can end up shaping our lives. It is at once a grand history of science and a far-reaching book about contemporary culture.