Remote Sensing And Gis In Ecosystem Management

Particularly about forests in the USA.

Contents: Introduction, Wetlands: An Overview, Kaliveli Wetland: A Typical Bulwark Against Drought, Assessing Land Use/Land Cover of Kaliveli Watershed Using Remote Sensing and GIS: Implications for Conservation, Soil Quality of Kaliveli and its Surroundings, Water Quality of Kaliveli Lake, Ground Water Quality of Kaliveli Lake and its Surroundings, Primary Productivity of Kaliveli: A Rare Estuarine Wetland of South Indian Peninsula, Macro Flora and the Plankton of Kaliveli, Fishes of the Kaliveli Lake, Avifauna of Kaliveli, In Parting&Overview.

A rich set of protocols for the process of assessing the ecological make-up of the land so as to guide environmental decision-making.

This is a book about how ecologists can integrate remote sensing and GIS in their daily work. It will allow ecologists to get started with the application of remote sensing and to understand its potential and limitations. Using practical examples, the book covers all necessary steps from planning field campaigns to deriving ecologically relevant information through remote sensing and modelling of species distributions. All practical examples in this book rely on OpenSource software and freely available data sets. Quantum GIS (QGIS) is introduced for basic GIS data handling, and in-depth spatial analytics and statistics are conducted with the software packages R and GRASS. Readers will learn how to apply remote sensing within ecological research projects, how to approach spatial data sampling and how to interpret remote sensing derived products. The authors discuss a wide range of statistical analyses with regard to satellite data as well as specialised topics such as time-series analysis. Extended scripts on how to create professional looking maps and graphics are also provided. This book is a valuable resource for students and scientists in the fields of conservation and ecology interested in learning how to get started in applying remote sensing in ecological research and conservation planning.

"Covers an entire spectrum of tropical ecosystems, their issues and management.

Lessons learned in the last several years have given clear indications that the prediction and efficient monitoring of disasters is one of the critical factors in decision-making process. In this respect space-based technologies have the great potential of supplying information in near real time. Earth observation satellites have already demonstrated their flexibility in providing data to a wide range of applications: weather forecasting, person and vehicle tracking, alerting to disaster, forest fire and flood monitoring, oil spills, spread of desertification, monitoring of crop and forestry damages. This book focuses on a wider utilisation of remote sensing in disaster management. The discussed aspects comprise data access/delivery to the users, information extraction and analysis, management of data and its integration with other data sources (airborne and terrestrial imagery, GIS data, etc.), data standardization, organisational and legal aspects of sharing remote sensing information.