During the 21st century, human–environment interactions will increasingly expose both systems to risks, but also yield opportunities for improvement as we gain insight into these complex, coupled ...systems. Human–environment interactions operate over multiple spatial and temporal scales, requiring large data volumes of multi‐resolution information for analysis. Climate change, land‐use change, urbanization, and wildfires, for example, can affect regions differently depending on ecological and socioeconomic structures. The relative scarcity of data on both humans and natural systems at the relevant extent can be prohibitive when pursuing inquiries into these complex relationships. We explore the value of multitemporal, high‐density, and high‐resolution LiDAR, imaging spectroscopy, and digital camera data from the National Ecological Observatory Network’s Airborne Observation Platform (NEON AOP) for Socio‐Environmental Systems (SES) research. In addition to providing an overview of NEON AOP datasets and outlining specific applications for addressing SES questions, we highlight current challenges and provide recommendations for the SES research community to improve and expand its use of this platform for SES research. The coordinated, nationwide AOP remote sensing data, collected annually over the next 30 yr, offer exciting opportunities for cross‐site analyses and comparison, upscaling metrics derived from LiDAR and hyperspectral datasets across larger spatial extents, and addressing questions across diverse scales. Integrating AOP data with other SES datasets will allow researchers to investigate complex systems and provide urgently needed policy recommendations for socio‐environmental challenges. We urge the SES research community to further explore questions and theories in social and economic disciplines that might leverage NEON AOP data.
Each year, terrestrial ecosystems absorb more than a quarter of the anthropogenic carbon emissions, termed as land carbon sink. An exceptionally large land carbon sink anomaly was recorded in 2011, ...of which more than half was attributed to Australia. However, the persistence and spatially attribution of this carbon sink remain largely unknown. Here we conducted an observation-based study to characterize the Australian land carbon sink through the novel coupling of satellite retrievals of atmospheric CO
and photosynthesis and in-situ flux tower measures. We show the 2010-11 carbon sink was primarily ascribed to savannas and grasslands. When all biomes were normalized by rainfall, shrublands however, were most efficient in absorbing carbon. We found the 2010-11 net CO
uptake was highly transient with rapid dissipation through drought. The size of the 2010-11 carbon sink over Australia (0.97 Pg) was reduced to 0.48 Pg in 2011-12, and was nearly eliminated in 2012-13 (0.08 Pg). We further report evidence of an earlier 2000-01 large net CO
uptake, demonstrating a repetitive nature of this land carbon sink. Given a significant increasing trend in extreme wet year precipitation over Australia, we suggest that carbon sink episodes will exert greater future impacts on global carbon cycle.
In this study, the relationship of above-ground net primary productivity (ANPP) with precipitation using the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) from satellite data as surrogate for ANPP was assessed. To ...use EVI as a proxy for ANPP we extracted the satellite data from areas with uniform vegetation in a 2x2 km area for the multi-site approach. In the multi-site analysis in the United States our results showed a strong exponential relationship between iEVI and annual precipitation across the sites and climate regimes studied. We found convergence of all sites toward common and maximum rain use efficiency under the water-limited conditions represented by the driest year at each site. Measures of inter-annual variability in iEVI with rainfall variation across biomes were similar to that reported by Knapp and Smith (2001) in which the more herbaceous dominant sites were found to be most sensitive to inter-annual variations in precipitation with no relationships found in woodland sites. The relationship was also evaluated in the southern hemisphere using a multi-site analysis with information from satellite TRMM for precipitation and MOD13Q1 from MODIS for EVI values at calendar and hydrologic year periods. The tested sites were located across the 6 major land cover types in Australia, obtained from MODIS MCD12Q1 product and used to compare the relationship across different biomes. The results showed significant agreement between the annual iEVI and annual precipitation across the biomes involved in this study showing non-significant differences between the calendar and hydrologic years for the 24 sites across different climatic conditions. At the regional scale we also assessed the ANPP-precipitation relationship across all of Australia. Precipitation data from TRMM was obtained at 0.25°x0.2°5 degrees spatial resolution and monthly temporal resolution and EVI values were obtained from the CGM (Climate Grid Modeling) MOD13C1-16-days and 5.6km temporal and spatial resolutions, respectively. Our results were in fair agreement with those from our first two studies and previous research and provided specific insights regarding the use iEVI as a proxy for productivity over extended regions as well as its combination with data sets from TRMM sensor for precipitation data.
When a person loses the sense of sight, in general, it is suggested to use a white cane to perform daily activities. However, using a white cane limits the movement of a person. In addition, guide ...dogs can be served in this impairment. However, the acquisition and maintenance of a guide dog is extremely high for people in development countries. In this regard, this paper presents a proof-of-concept of a low-cost robotic system able to guide a visual impaired, as a guide dog. The robot is specially designed for climbing stairs at indoors, and it uses convolutional neural networks (CNN) for both object detection and hand gesture recognition for special instructions from the user. Experimental results showed that our prototype robot can climb stairs with 86.7% of efficiency in concrete stair surfaces. Also, the visual representation by CNN performed more than 98% accuracy.
Nurse-Bot: A Robot System Applied to Medical Assistance Alvarez, Jesus; Campos, Guillermo; Enriquez, Valeria ...
2018 International Conference on Mechatronics, Electronics and Automotive Engineering (ICMEAE)
Conference Proceeding
Caring for the elderly and sick people is one of the biggest concerns of families. Those who experience the responsibility and the enormous work involved in this care recognizes that all kind of help ...it's welcomed. The objetive of this paper is to present Nurse-bot as a mechatronics system for taking care of the elderly and sick people. In particular, we refer this device not only as a tool, but with the time and development a true support to the people. It is like-a nurse made robot that monitors vital signs and keeps the information, so that the attending physician has up-to-date parameters before the consultation that allows a better follow-up of the results of the prescribed treatment made by a specialist. A proof-of-concept and the first prototype is presented in this work. Experimental results shows insights that this robot can help people.
In this study, the relationship of above-ground net primary productivity (ANPP) with precipitation using the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) from satellite data as surrogate for ANPP was assessed. To ...use EVI as a proxy for ANPP we extracted the satellite data from areas with uniform vegetation in a 2x2 km area for the multi-site approach.In the multi-site analysis in the United States our results showed a strong exponential relationship between iEVI and annual precipitation across the sites and climate regimes studied. We found convergence of all sites toward common and maximum rain use efficiency under the water-limited conditions represented by the driest year at each site. Measures of inter-annual variability in iEVI with rainfall variation across biomes were similar to that reported by Knapp and Smith (2001) in which the more herbaceous dominant sites were found to be most sensitive to interannual variations in precipitation with no relationships found in woodland sites.The relationship was also evaluated in the southern hemisphere using a multi-site analysis with information from satellite TRMM for precipitation and MOD13Q1 from MODIS for EVI values at calendar and hydrologic year periods. The tested sites were located across the 6 major land cover types inAustralia, obtained from MODIS MCD12Q1 product and used to compare the relationship across different biomes. The results showed significant agreement between the annual iEVI and annual precipitation across the biomes involved in this study showing non-significant differences between the calendar and hydrologic years for the 24 sites across different climatic conditions.At the regional scale we also assessed the ANPP-precipitation relationship across all of Australia. Precipitation data from TRMM was obtained at 0.25x0.25 degrees spatial resolution and monthly temporal resolution and EVI values were obtained from the CGM (Climate Grid Modeling) MOD13C1-16-days and 5.6km temporal and spatial resolutions, respectively. Our results were in fair agreement with those from our first two studies and previous research and provided specific insights regarding the use iEVI as a proxy for productivity over extended regions as well as its combination with data sets from TRMM sensor for precipitation data.
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