Hemispherical Photography In Forest Science Theory Methods Applications

This book presents practical information about hemispherical photography from the perspectives of field data acquisition, image processing and information retrieval methods. This book is organized into three sections. The first section describes what is hemispherical photography and what are the fundamental elements of forest structure and light interactions within the forest canopy. The second section provides practical information about the equipment, procedures and tools for procuring, processing and analyzing hemispherical photographs. Armed with this information, the third section describes several applications of hemispherical photographs to forestry and natural resource assessment. The book concludes with a discussion about modelling tools and future directions of this rapidly growing field. There is currently no information source on the market that has this comprehensive range of topics combined in a single book. The book will appeal to academics, graduate students, natural resource professionals and researchers alike.

Accurate solar radiation knowledge and its characterization on the Earth’s surface are of high interest in many aspects of environmental and engineering sciences. Modeling of solar irradiance from satellite imagery has become the most widely used method for retrieving solar irradiance information under total sky conditions, particularly in the solar energy community. Solar radiation modeling, forecasting, and characterization continue to be broad areas of study, research, and development in the scientific community. This Special Issue contains a small sample of the current activities in this field. Both the environmental and climatology community, as the solar energy world, share a great interest in improving modeling tools and capabilities for obtaining more reliable and accurate knowledge of solar irradiance components worldwide. The work presented in this Special Issue also remarks on the significant role that remote sensing technologies play in retrieving and forecasting solar radiation information.

Land, as a fundamental resource in regional development, provides major opportunities for farming, housing, urban planning, and financing. In order to meet the requirements of the new era, every state has developed and implemented a series of policies according to its national specificities and to the international regulations and trends. Geospatial Technologies for Effective Land Governance is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the application of the use of GNSS, remote sensing, and GIS. While highlighting topics such as crop management, multispectral images, and irrigation, this publication explores land administration, encompassing both cadastral systems and land registration, as well as the methods of land governance strategies. This book is ideally designed for researchers, agricultural professionals, engineers, environmentalists, land developers, educators, students, and policymakers seeking current research on land and land-based conflicts in urban and rural communities.

This book is devoted to current problems of artificial and computational intelligence including decision-making systems. Collecting, analysis, and processing information are the current directions of modern computer science. Development of new modern information and computer technologies for data analysis and processing in various fields of data mining and machine learning creates the conditions for increasing effectiveness of the information processing by both the decrease of time and the increase of accuracy of the data processing. The book contains of 54 science papers which include the results of research concerning the current directions in the fields of data mining, machine learning, and decision making. The papers are divided in terms of their topic into three sections. The first section "Analysis and Modeling of Complex Systems and Processes" contains of 26 papers, and the second section "Theoretical and Applied Aspects of Decision-Making Systems" contains of 13 papers. There are 15 papers in the third section "Computational Intelligence and Inductive Modeling". The book is focused to scientists and developers in the fields of data mining, machine learning and decision-making systems.

In the summer of 2003, a workshop was held in Portsmouth, NH, to discuss land measurement techniques for the North American Carbon Program. Over 40 sci- tists representing government agencies, academia and nonprofit research organi- tions located in Canada, the US and Mexico participated. During the course of the workshop a number of topics were discussed, with an emphasis on the following: • The need for an intermediate tier of carbon measurements. This level of study would be more extensive than state-level inventories of the US Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, but less detailed than intensive ecos- tem studies sites such as those in Long Term Ecological Research network. This tier would ideally provide a basis to link and scale remote sensing measurements and inventory data, and supply data required to parameterize existing models (see Wofsy and Harriss 2002, Denning et al. 2005). • The design criteria that such a network of sites should meet. The network and s- pling design should be standardized, but flexible enough to be applied across North America. The design also needs to be efficient enough to be implemented without the need for large field crews, yet robust enough to provide useful information. Finally, the spatial scale must permit easy linkage to remotely sensed data. • The key variables that should be measured at each site, and the frequency of measurement.

Remote Sensing of Forest Environments: Concepts and Case Studies is an edited volume intended to provide readers with a state-of-the-art synopsis of the current methods and applied applications employed in remote sensing the world's forests. The contributing authors have sought to illustrate and deepen our understanding of remote sensing of forests, providing new insights and indicating opportunities that are created when forests and forest practices are considered in concert with the evolving paradigm of remote sensing science. Following background and methods sections, this book introduces a series of case studies that exemplify the ways in which remotely sensed data are operationally used, as an element of the decision-making process, and in the scientific study of forests. Remote Sensing of Forest Environments: Concepts and Case Studies is designed to meet the needs of a professional audience composed of both practitioners and researchers. This book is also suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level students in Forestry, Environmental Science, Geography, Engineering, and Computer Science.

The two-volume set IFIP AICT 392 and 393 constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 6th IFIP TC 5, SIG 5.1 International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture, CCTA 2012, held in Zhangjiajie, China, in October 2012. The 108 revised papers presented were carefully selected from numerous submissions. They cover a wide range of interesting theories and applications of information technology in agriculture, including Internet of things and cloud computing; simulation models and decision-support systems for agricultural production; smart sensor, monitoring, and control technology; traceability and e-commerce technology; computer vision, computer graphics, and virtual reality; the application of information and communication technology in agriculture; and universal information service technology and service systems development in rural areas. The 55 papers included in the second volume focus on GIS, GPS, RS, and Precision Farming.

Ecology at the ecosystem level has both necessitated and benefited from new methods and technologies as well as those adapted from other disciplines. With the ascendancy of ecosystem science and management, the need has arisen for a comprehensive treatment of techniques used in this rapidly-growing field. Methods in Ecosystem Science answers that need by synthesizing the advantages, disadvantages and tradeoffs associated with the most commonly used techniques in both aquatic and terrestrial research. The book is divided into sections addressing carbon and energy dynamics, nutrient and water dynamics, manipulative ecosystem experiements and tools to synthesize our understanding of ecosystems. Detailed information about various methods will help researchers choose the most appropriate methods for their particular studies. Prominent scientists discuss how tools from a variety of disciplines can be used in ecosystem science at different scales.