Program Earth Gabrys, Jennifer
04/2016, Volume:
49
eBook
Open access
Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, ...water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available.
Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world,Program Earthexamines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As Jennifer Gabrys points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing,Program Earthasks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become?
Program Earthsuggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new "technogeographies" that connect technology, nature, and people.
Remote Sensing Digital Image Analysis provides the non-specialist with an introduction to quantitative evaluation of satellite and aircraft derived remotely retrieved data. Each chapter covers the ...pros and cons of digital remotely sensed data, without detailed mathematical treatment of computer based algorithms, but in a manner conductive to an understanding of their capabilities and limitations. Problems conclude each chapter. This fourth edition has been developed to reflect the changes that have occurred in this area over the past several years. Its focus is on those procedures that seem now to have become part of the set of tools regularly used to perform thematic mapping. As with previous revisions, the fundamental material has been preserved in its original form because of its tutorial value; its style has been revised in places and it has been supplemented if newer aspects have emerged in the time since the third edition appeared. It still meets, however, the needs of the senior student and practitioner.
This Open Access volume aims to methodologically improve our understanding of biodiversity by linking disciplines that incorporate remote sensing, and uniting data and perspectives in the fields of ...biology, landscape ecology, and geography. The book provides a framework for how biodiversity can be detected and evaluated—focusing particularly on plants—using proximal and remotely sensed hyperspectral data and other tools such as LiDAR. The volume, whose chapters bring together a large cross-section of the biodiversity community engaged in these methods, attempts to establish a common language across disciplines for understanding and implementing remote sensing of biodiversity across scales. The first part of the book offers a potential basis for remote detection of biodiversity. An overview of the nature of biodiversity is described, along with ways for determining traits of plant biodiversity through spectral analyses across spatial scales and linking spectral data to the tree of life. The second part details what can be detected spectrally and remotely. Specific instrumentation and technologies are described, as well as the technical challenges of detection and data synthesis, collection and processing. The third part discusses spatial resolution and integration across scales and ends with a vision for developing a global biodiversity monitoring system. Topics include spectral and functional variation across habitats and biomes, biodiversity variables for global scale assessment, and the prospects and pitfalls in remote sensing of biodiversity at the global scale.
Over the past 24 years, the AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) program has provided highly accurate remote-sensing characterization of aerosol optical and physical properties for an increasingly ...extensive geographic distribution including all continents and many oceanic island and coastal sites. The measurements and retrievals from the AERONET global network have addressed satellite and model validation needs very well, but there have been challenges in making comparisons to similar parameters from in situ surface and airborne measurements. Additionally, with improved spatial and temporal satellite remote sensing of aerosols, there is a need for higher spatial-resolution ground-based remote-sensing networks. An effort to address these needs resulted in a number of field campaign networks called Distributed Regional Aerosol Gridded Observation Networks (DRAGONs) that were designed to provide a database for in situ and remote-sensing comparison and analysis of local to mesoscale variability in aerosol properties. This paper describes the DRAGON deployments that will continue to contribute to the growing body of research related to meso- and microscale aerosol features and processes. The research presented in this special issue illustrates the diversity of topics that has resulted from the application of data from these networks.
In the last few years, huge amounts of progress have been made regarding remote sensing in the field of computer vision. This success and progress is mostly due to the effectiveness of deep learning ...(DL) algorithms. In addition, the remote sensing community has shifted its attention to DL, and DL algorithms have been used to achieve significant success in many image analysis tasks. However, with regard to remote sensing, a number of challenges caused by difficulties in data acquisition and annotation have not been fully solved yet. This reprint is a collection of novel developments in the field of remote sensing using computer vision, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. The articles published involve fundamental theoretical analyses as well as those demonstrating their application to real-world problems.
With the recent advances in remote sensing technologies for Earth observation, many different remote sensors are collecting data with distinctive properties. The obtained data are so large and ...complex that analyzing them manually becomes impractical or even impossible. Therefore, understanding remote sensing images effectively, in connection with physics, has been the primary concern of the remote sensing research community in recent years. For this purpose, machine learning is thought to be a promising technique because it can make the system learn to improve itself. With this distinctive characteristic, the algorithms will be more adaptive, automatic, and intelligent. This book introduces some of the most challenging issues of machine learning in the field of remote sensing, and the latest advanced technologies developed for different applications. It integrates with multi-source/multi-temporal/multi-scale data, and mainly focuses on learning to understand remote sensing images. Particularly, it presents many more effective techniques based on the popular concepts of deep learning and big data to reach new heights of data understanding. Through reporting recent advances in the machine learning approaches towards analyzing and understanding remote sensing images, this book can help readers become more familiar with knowledge frontier and foster an increased interest in this field.
With the recent advances in remote sensing technologies for Earth observation, many different remote sensors are collecting data with distinctive properties. The obtained data are so large and ...complex that analyzing them manually becomes impractical or even impossible. Therefore, understanding remote sensing images effectively, in connection with physics, has been the primary concern of the remote sensing research community in recent years. For this purpose, machine learning is thought to be a promising technique because it can make the system learn to improve itself. With this distinctive characteristic, the algorithms will be more adaptive, automatic, and intelligent. This book introduces some of the most challenging issues of machine learning in the field of remote sensing, and the latest advanced technologies developed for different applications. It integrates with multi-source/multi-temporal/multi-scale data, and mainly focuses on learning to understand remote sensing images. Particularly, it presents many more effective techniques based on the popular concepts of deep learning and big data to reach new heights of data understanding. Through reporting recent advances in the machine learning approaches towards analyzing and understanding remote sensing images, this book can help readers become more familiar with knowledge frontier and foster an increased interest in this field.
The severity and the extent of a large fire event that occurred on the small volcanic island of Stromboli (Aeolian archipelago, Italy) on 25-26 May 2022 were evaluated through remotely sensed data to ...assess the short-term effect of fire on local plant communities. For this purpose, the differenced normalized burned index (dNBR) was also used to quantify the extent of early-stage vegetation recovery dominated by Saccharum biflorum Forssk. (Poaceae), a rhizomatous C.sub.4 perennial grass of Paleotropical origin. The burned area was estimated to have an extension of 337.83 ha, corresponding to 27.7 % of the island surface and to 49.8 % of Stromboli's vegetated area. On the one hand, this event considerably damaged the native plant communities, hosting many species of high biogeographic interest. On the other hand, Saccharum biflorum clearly benefited from fire. In fact, this species showed a very high vegetative performance after burning, being able to exert unchallenged dominance in the early stages of the postfire succession. Our results confirm the complex and probably synergic impact of different human disturbances (repeated fires and the introduction of invasive alien plants) on the natural ecosystems of small volcanic islands.
Recent developments in atmospheric remote sensing from satellites have made it possible to resolve daily emission plumes from industrial point sources around the globe. Wind rotation aggregation ...coupled with statistical fitting is commonly used to extract emission estimates from these observations. These methods are used here to investigate how the Coriolis effect influences the trajectory of observed emission plumes as well as to assess the impact of this influence on satellite-derived emission estimates. Of the 16 industrial sites investigated, 9 showed the expected curvature for the hemisphere that they reside in, 5 showed no or negligible curvature, and 2 showed opposing or unusual curvature. The sites that showed conflicting curvature reside in topographically diverse regions, where strong meso-γ-scale (2-20 km) turbulence dominates over larger synoptic circulation patterns. For high-curvature cases, the assumption that the wind-rotated plume aggregate is symmetrically distributed across the downwind axis breaks down, which impairs the quality of statistical fitting procedures. Using annual NO.sub.x emissions from Matimba power station as a test case, not compensating for Coriolis curvature resulted in an underestimation of ⼠9 % on average for the years 2018 to 2021. This study is the first formal observation of the Coriolis effect and its influence on satellite-derived emission estimates, and it highlights both the variability in the emission calculation methods and the need for a standardised scheme for these data to act as evidence for regulators.
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