A Coming of Age: Geospatial Analysis and Modelling in the Early Twenty First Century Forty years ago when spatial analysis first emerged as a distinct theme within geography's quantitative revolution, the focus was largely on consistent methods for measuring spatial correlation. The concept of spatial au- correlation took pride of place, mirroring concerns in time-series analysis about similar kinds of dependence known to distort the standard probability theory used to derive appropriate statistics. Early applications of spatial correlation tended to reflect geographical patterns expressed as points. The perspective taken on such analytical thinking was founded on induction, the search for pattern in data with a view to suggesting appropriate hypotheses which could subsequently be tested. In parallel but using very different techniques came the development of a more deductive style of analysis based on modelling and thence simulation. Here the focus was on translating prior theory into forms for generating testable predictions whose outcomes could be compared with observations about some system or phenomenon of interest. In the intervening years, spatial analysis has broadened to embrace both inductive and deductive approaches, often combining both in different mixes for the variety of problems to which it is now applied.

A survey of the feasibility of aircraft- and satellite-based methods for revealing environmental-geological problems. Throughout, a balanced ratio between explanations on the methodological/technical side and presentations of case studies is maintained. The comparison of case studies from North America and Germany shows how the respective territorial conditions lead to distinct methodological approaches. Equally, the considerable dissimilarities in population density and in distances between waste disposal areas, settlements, and areas of protected groundwater necessitate a "diversified methods" approach.

Water is vital to life, maintenance of ecological balance, economic development, and sustenance of civilization. Planning and management of water resources and its optimal use are a matter of urgency for most countries of the world, and even more so for India with a huge population. Growing population and expanding economic activities exert increasing demands on water for varied needs--domestic, industrial, agricultural, power generation, navigation, recreation, etc. In India, agriculture is the highest user of water. The past three decades have witnessed numerous advances as well as have presented intriguing challenges and exciting opportunities in hydrology and water resources. Compounding them has been the growing environmental consciousness. Nowhere are these challenges more apparent than in India. As we approach the twenty first century, it is entirely fitting to take stock of what has been accomplished and what remains to be accomplished, and what accomplishments are relevant, with particular reference to Indian conditions."

"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.

Digital Soil Mapping is the creation and the population of a geographically referenced soil database. It is generated at a given resolution by using field and laboratory observation methods coupled with environmental data through quantitative relationships. Digital soil mapping is advancing on different fronts at different rates all across the world. This book presents the state-of-the art and explores strategies for bridging research, production, and environmental application of digital soil mapping.It includes examples from North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. The chapters address the following topics: - evaluating and using legacy soil data - exploring new environmental covariates and sampling schemes - using integrated sensors to infer soil properties or status - innovative inference systems predicting soil classes, properties, and estimating their uncertainties - using digital soil mapping and techniques for soil assessment and environmental application - protocol and capacity building for making digital soil mapping operational around the globe. "

The ability to extract generic 3D objects from images is a crucial step towards automation of a variety of problems in cartographic database compilation, industrial inspection and assembly, and autonomous navigation. Many of these problem domains do not have strong constraints on object shape or scene content, presenting serious obstacles for the development of robust object detection and delineation techniques. Geometric Constraints for Object Detection and Delineation addresses these problems with a suite of novel methods and techniques for detecting and delineating generic objects in images of complex scenes, and applies them to the specific task of building detection and delineation from monocular aerial imagery. PIVOT, the fully automated system implementing these techniques, is quantitatively evaluated on 83 images covering 18 test scenes, and compared to three existing systems for building extraction. The results highlight the performance improvements possible with rigorous photogrammetric camera modeling, primitive-based object representations, and geometric constraints derived from their combination. PIVOT's performance illustrates the implications of a clearly articulated set of philosophical principles, taking a significant step towards automatic detection and delineation of 3D objects in real-world environments. Geometric Constraints for Object Detection and Delineation is suitable as a textbook or as a secondary text for a graduate-level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Water is vital to life, maintenance of ecological balance, economic development, and sustenance of civilization. Planning and management of water resources and its optimal use are a matter of urgency for most countries of the world, and even more so for India with a huge population. Growing population and expanding economic activities exert increasing demands on water for varied needs--domestic, industrial, agricultural, power generation, navigation, recreation, etc. In India, agriculture is the highest user of water. The past three decades have witnessed numerous advances as well as have presented intriguing challenges and exciting opportunities in hydrology and water resources. Compounding them has been the growing environmental consciousness. Nowhere are these challenges more apparent than in India. As we approach the twenty first century, it is entirely fitting to take stock of what has been accomplished and what remains to be accomplished, and what accomplishments are relevant, with particular reference to Indian conditions."

Geographic information systems have developed rapidly in the past decade, and are now a major class of software, with applications that include infrastructure maintenance, resource management, agriculture, Earth science, and planning. But a lack of standards has led to a general inability for one GIS to interoperate with another. It is difficult for one GIS to share data with another, or for people trained on one system to adapt easily to the commands and user interface of another. Failure to interoperate is a problem at many levels, ranging from the purely technical to the semantic and the institutional. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is about efforts to improve the ability of GISs to interoperate, and has been assembled through a collaboration between academic researchers and the software vendor community under the auspices of the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and the Open GIS Consortium Inc. It includes chapters on the basic principles and the various conceptual frameworks that the research community has developed to think about the problem. Other chapters review a wide range of applications and the experiences of the authors in trying to achieve interoperability at a practical level. Interoperability opens enormous potential for new ways of using GIS and new mechanisms for exchanging data, and these are covered in chapters on information marketplaces, with special reference to geographic information. Institutional arrangements are also likely to be profoundly affected by the trend towards interoperable systems, and nowhere is the impact of interoperability more likely to cause fundamental change than in education, as educators address the needs of a new generation of GIS users with access to a new generation of tools. The book concludes with a series of chapters on education and institutional change. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is suitable as a secondary text for graduate level courses in computer science, geography, spatial databases, and interoperability and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, commerce and government.

Climate change has been addressed since last decade based on the influence of human activities like production of industrial effluents, land use changes and other activities due to development of the society. These are very important issues no doubt but the activities due to the influence of extraterrestrial phenomena have not been given its due importance. An attempt is being made here to understand the influence of extraterrestrial activities as one of the important factors of climate change has been attempted here. The influence of Sun and distant stars on the environment of the earth has been studied during the cyclic changes in the Sun as well as episodic changes in the environment due to the effect of other celestial objects in between Sun-Earth environment. The study has been carried out based on the changes within the Sun as well as changes during the solar eclipse. During these extra terrestrial changes it has been observed that the earth changes in its atmosphere as well as geosphere, which may have local effect but the increase of these local effect in large scale may contribute to the climate change. Solar radiation drives atmospheric circulation. Since solar radiation represents almost all the energy available to the Earth, accounting for solar radiation and how it interacts with the atmosphere and the Earth's surface is fundamental to understanding the Earth's energy budget.

Geometric properties and relations play central roles in the description and processing of spatial data. The properties and relations studied by mathematicians usually have precise definitions, but verbal descriptions often involve imprecisely defined concepts such as elongatedness or proximity. The methods used in soft computing provide a framework for formulating and manipulating such concepts. This volume contains eight papers on the soft definition and manipulation of spatial relations and gives a comprehensive summary on the subject.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Geographic Information Science, GIScience 2012, held in Columbus, OH, USA in September 2012. The 26 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. While the traditional research topics are well reflected in the papers, emerging topics that involve new research hot-spots such as cyber infrastructure, big data, web-based computing also occupy a significant portion of the volume.

The Siberian environment is a unique region of the world that is both very strongly affected by global climate change and at the same time particularly vulnerable to its consequences. The news about the melting of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and the prospect of an ice-free shipping passage from Scandinavia to Alaska along the Russian north coast has sparked an international debate about natural resource exploitation, national boundaries and the impacts of the rapid changes on people, animals and plants. Over the last decades Siberia has also witnessed severe forest fires to an extent that is hard to imagine in other parts of the world where the po- lation density is higher, the fire-prone ecosystems cover much smaller areas and the systems of fire control are better resourced. The acceleration of the fire regime poses the question of the future of the boreal forest in the taiga region. Vegetation models have already predicted a shift of vegetation zones to the north under s- narios of global climate change. The implications of a large-scale expansion of the grassland steppe ecosystems in the south of Siberia and a retreat of the taiga forest into the tundra systems that expand towards the Arctic Ocean would be very signi- cant for the local population and the economy. I have studied Russian forests from remote sensing and modelling for about 11 years now and still find it a fascinating subject to investigate.

This book is the latest volume in the series entitled " Data and Knowledge in a Changing World ", published by the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) of the International Council of Scientific Unions (Icsu). This series was established to collect together, from many diverse fields, the wealth of information pertaining t.o the intelligent exploitation of data in the conduct of science and technology. This volume is the first in a two-volume series that will discuss techniques for the analysis of natural dynamic systems, and their applications to a variety of geophysical problems. The present volume lays out the theoretical foun dations for these techniques. The second volume will use these techniques in applications to fields such as seismology, geodynamics, geoelectricity, ge omagnetism, aeromagnetics, topography and bathymetry. The book consists of two parts, which describe two complementary ap proaches to the analysis of natural systems. The first, written by A. Gvishi ani, deals with dynamic pattern recognition. It lays out the mathematical VI Foreword theory and the formalized algorithms that. forms the basis for the classifi cation of vector objects and the use of this classification in the study of dynamical systems, with particular emphasis on the prediction of system behavior in space and time. It discusses the construction of classification schemes, and the evaluation of their stability and reliability.

This book reports on developments in Proximal Soil Sensing (PSS) and high resolution digital soil mapping. PSS has become a multidisciplinary area of study that aims to develop field-based techniques for collecting information on the soil from close by, or within, the soil. Amongst others, PSS involves the use of optical, geophysical, electrochemical, mathematical and statistical methods. This volume, suitable for undergraduate course material and postgraduate research, brings together ideas and examples from those developing and using proximal sensors and high resolution digital soil maps for applications such as precision agriculture, soil contamination, archaeology, peri-urban design and high land-value applications, where there is a particular need for high spatial resolution information. The book in particular covers soil sensor sampling, proximal soil sensor development and use, sensor calibrations, prediction methods for large data sets, applications of proximal soil sensing, and high-resolution digital soil mapping. Key themes: soil sensor sampling - soil sensor calibrations - spatial prediction methods - reflectance spectroscopy - electromagnetic induction and electrical resistivity - radar and gamma radiometrics - multi-sensor platforms - high resolution digital soil mapping - applications Raphael A. Viscarra Rossel is a scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) of Australia. Alex McBratney is Pro-Dean and Professor of Soil Science in the Faculty of Agriculture Food & Natural Resources at the University of Sydney in Australia. Budiman Minasny is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Agriculture Food & Natural Resources at the University of Sydney in Australia.

This bookisan outgrowthoften yearsof researchatthe Universityof Florida Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory (CNEL) in the general area of statistical signal processing and machine learning. One of the goals of writing the book is exactly to bridge the two ?elds that share so many common problems and techniques but are not yet e?ectively collaborating. Unlikeotherbooks thatcoverthe state ofthe artinagiven?eld, this book cuts across engineering (signal processing) and statistics (machine learning) withacommontheme: learningseenfromthepointofviewofinformationt- orywithanemphasisonRenyi'sde?nitionofinformation.Thebasicapproach is to utilize the information theory descriptors of entropy and divergence as nonparametric cost functions for the design of adaptive systems in unsup- vised or supervised training modes. Hence the title: Information-Theoretic Learning (ITL). In the course of these studies, we discovered that the main idea enabling a synergistic view as well as algorithmic implementations, does not involve the conventional central moments of the data (mean and covariance). Rather, the core concept is the ?-norm of the PDF, in part- ular its expected value (? = 2), which we call the information potential. This operator and related nonparametric estimators link information theory, optimization of adaptive systems, and reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces in a simple and unconventional way.

Wetlands are, by their very nature, ephemeral and transitional, which makes them challenging to characterize. Yet the need for characterizing wetlands continues to grow, particularly as we develop a better understanding of the wealth of ecosystem services that they provide. Wetland Landscape Characterization: Practical Tools, Methods, and Approaches for Landscape Ecology, Second Edition shows how wetland characterization tools, methods, and approaches can be integrated to more effectively address twenty-first-century wetland issues. A Practical Toolbox for Integrated Wetland Landscape Characterization The book explains how to locate, identify, and map the extent of wetlands to learn more about their importance to society and the larger landscape. It examines jurisdictional, regulatory, and practical applications from the scientific, engineering, and lay perspectives. Fully updated, the second edition reflects an emerging infrastructural, ecosystem goods-and-services perspective to better assist readers who may encounter these concepts and challenges as they assess and characterize wetlands. Examples and case studies illustrate a variety of situations and solutions, highlighting the use of current techniques to assess, inventory, and monitor natural resources under changing conditions. These examples offer lessons and ideas for the issues encountered every day by wetland landscape ecology practitioners. The book also refers readers to additional resources to help them solve specific challenges. New in This Edition Updates of practical geospatial methods More project-driven examples A description of the pitfalls of using ecological data at landscape scales, along with solutions Alternative techniques for a variety of practitioners Linkages between field and landscape ecological practices Online resources for practitioners New illustrations This book helps readers develop the concepts, skills, and understanding of how to best achieve project goals in the rapidly changing disciplines of landscape science and wetland ecology and management. A valuable resource, it provides practical tools, methods, and approaches for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing broad-scale wetland projects that take into account critical societal linkages.

This book documents research conducted on the analysis of urban growth and sprawl by using remote sensing data and GIS techniques. The research was conducted between 1980-2010 in the city of Kolkata, India. The aim of the research was to use metrics that were less demanding in terms of data and computation than normal metrics. However, it has been found that most of them were inferior in capturing insights of urban sprawl. For this book, some of these metrics have therefore been modified and new ones are proposed. The research focuses on problems associated with the analysis of urban growth by using remote sensing data from a technological perspective.

This book is intended to provide a text on statistical methods for detecting clus ters and/or clustering of health events that is of interest to ?nal year undergraduate and graduate level statistics, biostatistics, epidemiology, and geography students but will also be of relevance to public health practitioners, statisticians, biostatisticians, epidemiologists, medical geographers, human geographers, environmental scien tists, and ecologists. Prerequisites are introductory biostatistics and epidemiology courses. With increasing public health concerns about environmental risks, the need for sophisticated methods for analyzing spatial health events is immediate. Further more, the research area of statistical tests for disease clustering now attracts a wide audience due to the perceived need to implement wide ranging monitoring systems to detect possible health related bioterrorism activity. With this background and the development of the geographical information system (GIS), the analysis of disease clustering of health events has seen considerable development over the last decade. Therefore, several excellent books on spatial epidemiology and statistics have re cently been published. However, it seems to me that there is no other book solely focusing on statistical methods for disease clustering. I hope that readers will ?nd this book useful and interesting as an introduction to the subject.

Natural and anthropogenic disasters have caused a large number of victims and significant social and economic losses in the last few years. There is no doubt that the risk prevention and disaster management sector needs drastic measures and improvements in order to decrease damage and save lives of inhabitants. Effective utilization of satellite positioning, remote sensing, and GIS in disaster monitoring and management requires research and development in numerous areas: data collection, access and delivery, information extraction and analysis, management and their integration with other data sources (airborne and terrestrial imagery, GIS data, etc.), data standardization, organizational and legal aspects of sharing of remote sensing information. This book provides researchers and practitioners with a good overview of what is being developed in this topical area.

The book provides a comprehensive insight into watersheds and modeling of the hydrological processes in the watersheds. It covers the concepts of watershed hydrology and watershed management in depth. The basic types, of soil erosion and its measurement and estimation of runoff and soil loss from the small and large watersheds are discussed. Recent advances in the watershed management like the application of remote sensing and GIS and hydrological models are a part of the book. The book serve as a guide for professional and competitive examinations for undergraduate students of Agriculture and Agricultural Engineering and graduate students of Soil Science, Soil and Water Engineering, Agricultural Physics, Hydrology and Watershed Management.

The early 21st century marks a new era in space exploration. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States, The European Space Agency (ESA), as well as space agencies of Japan, China, India, and other countries have sent their probes to the Moon, Mars, and other planets in the solar system. Planetary Remote Sensing and Mapping introduces original research and new developments in the areas of planetary remote sensing, photogrammetry, mapping, GIS, and planetary science resulting from the recent space exploration missions. Topics covered include: Reference systems of planetary bodies Planetary exploration missions and sensors Geometric information extraction from planetary remote sensing data Feature information extraction from planetary remote sensing data Planetary remote sensing data fusion Planetary data management and presentation Planetary Remote Sensing and Mapping will serve scientists and professionals working in the planetary remote sensing and mapping areas, as well as planetary probe designers, engineers, and planetary geologists and geophysicists. It also provides useful reading material for university teachers and students in the broader areas of remote sensing, photogrammetry, cartography, GIS, and geodesy.

This book is devoted to some of the problems encountered in the theory of sophisticated signals used in radar. The term sophisticated signal is under stood to mean a signal for which the product of the signal duration by the spectrum width substantially exceeds unity. Although it is impossible to draw an exact borderline between simple and sophisticated signals, the term "sophisticated signal" is sufficient to define one of the principal characteristics of modern radar. Recently, various sophisticated signals (frequency-modulated pulses, coded groups, phase-modulated signals, etc.) have found use in radar. This makes it possible to improve the resolution, to ensure simultaneous measurements of the range and range rate of a target, to elecrically scan over finite angular dimensions, etc. Although the realization of such potentialities is associated with substantial difficulties, one can say with certainty that "classical" radar technology, which uses simple signals at constant frequency and duty cycle, yields to more complex methods based on the use of wide-band signals of the sophisticated structure. The properties of radar signals, which characterize the measurement of a target's range and range rate, are described by the Woodward ambiguity function. The role of this function is similar to that of the antenna pattern, i.e., the ambiguity function defines the accuracy and resolution of the range and range rate measurements to the same extent as the antenna pattern de fines the accuracy and resolution of the azimuth and elevation measurements."

For the fourth consecutive year, the Association of Geographic Infor- tion Laboratories for Europe (AGILE) promoted the edition of a book with the collection of the scientific papers that were submitted as full-papers to the AGILE annual international conference. Those papers went through a th competitive review process. The 13 AGILE conference call for fu- papers of original and unpublished fundamental scientific research resulted in 54 submissions, of which 21 were accepted for publication in this - lume (acceptance rate of 39%). Published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Car- th graphy, this book is associated to the 13 AGILE Conference on G- graphic Information Science, held in 2010 in Guimaraes, Portugal, under the title "Geospatial Thinking." The efficient use of geospatial information and related technologies assumes the knowledge of concepts that are fundamental components of Geospatial Thinking, which is built on reasoning processes, spatial conc- tualizations, and representation methods. Geospatial Thinking is associated with a set of cognitive skills consisting of several forms of knowledge and cognitive operators used to transform, combine or, in any other way, act on that same knowledge. The scientific papers published in this volume cover an important set of topics within Geoinformation Science, including: Representation and Visualisation of Geographic Phenomena; Spatiotemporal Data Analysis; Geo-Collaboration, Participation, and Decision Support; Semantics of Geoinformation and Knowledge Discovery; Spatiotemporal Modelling and Reasoning; and Web Services, Geospatial Systems and Real-time Appli- tions."

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, formal modelling, use of sensors, semantics and ontology, allows for the better adaptation of information to the needs of the users. In order to design a new framework in pre-disaster and disaster management safety/security/privacy aspects of institutions and citizens need to be considered. All this can only be achieved by demonstrating new research achievements, sharing best practices (e.g. in the health area) and working towards the wider acceptance of geospatial technology in society, with the help of education and media.

This book will outline research frontiers and applications of cartography and GI in EW and CM and document their roles and potentials in wider processes going on in information/knowledge-based societies.