ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information — Open Access Journal

Agricultural monitoring has greatly benefited from the increased availability of a wide variety of remote-sensed satellite imagery, ground-sensed data (e.g., weather station networks) and crop models, delivering a wealth of actionable information to stakeholders to better streamline and improve agricultural practices. Nevertheless, as the degree of sophistication of agriculture monitoring systems increases, significant challenges arise due to the handling and integration of multi-scale data sources to present information to decision-makers in a way which is useful, understandable and user friendly. To address these issues, in this article we present the conceptual architecture and service-oriented implementation of a regional geoportal, specifically focused on rice crop monitoring in order to perform unified monitoring with a supporting system at regional scale. It is capable of storing, processing, managing, serving and visualizing monitoring and generated data products with different granularity and originating from different data sources. Specifically, we focus on data sources and data flow, and their importance for and in relation to different stakeholders. In the context of an EU-funded research project, we present an implementation of the regional geoportal for rice monitoring, which is currently in use in Europe’s three largest rice-producing countries, Italy, Greece and Spain. Full article

Missing data reconstruction is a critical step in the analysis and mining of spatio-temporal data; however, few studies comprehensively consider missing data patterns, sample selection and spatio-temporal relationships. As a result, traditional methods often fail to obtain satisfactory accuracy or address high levels of complexity. To combat these problems, this study developed an effective two-step method for spatio-temporal missing data reconstruction (ST-2SMR). This approach includes a coarse-grained interpolation method for considering missing patterns, which can successfully eliminate the influence of continuous missing data on the overall results. Based on the results of coarse-grained interpolation, a dynamic sliding window selection algorithm was implemented to determine the most relevant sample data for fine-grained interpolation, considering both spatial and temporal heterogeneity. Finally, spatio-temporal interpolation results were integrated by using a neural network model. We validated our approach using Beijing air quality data and found that the proposed method outperforms existing solutions in term of estimation accuracy and reconstruction rate. Full article

The prediction of suspect location enables proactive experiences for crime investigations and offers essential intelligence for crime prevention. However, existing studies have failed to capture the complex social location transition patterns of suspects and lack the capacity to address the issue of data sparsity. This paper proposes a novel location prediction model called CMoB (Crime Multi-order Bayes model) based on the spatiotemporal semantics to enhance the prediction performance. In particular, the model groups suspects with similar spatiotemporal semantics as one target suspect. Then, their mobility data are applied to estimate Markov transition probabilities of unobserved locations based on a KDE (kernel density estimating) smoothing method. Finally, by integrating the total transition probabilities, which are derived from the multi-order property of the Markov transition matrix, into a Bayesian-based formula, it is able to realize multi-step location prediction for the individual suspect. Experiments with the mobility dataset covering 210 suspects and their 18,754 location records from January to June 2012 in Wuhan City show that the proposed CMoB model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for suspect location prediction in the context of data sparsity. Full article

Public law affects contemporary life by imposing various regulations that apply in 3D space. However, such restrictions are either literally described in legal documents or presented on a horizontal plane, resulting in ambiguities, especially in the case of vertically overlapping restrictions with a significant impact on land management. This paper investigates public law restrictions (PLR) applying to 3D space and their management within a 3D cadastral context. Within this framework, a case study is examined in Greece concerning the establishment of a subway station, focusing on public utilities, archaeological legislation, and building regulations. Relative legal documentation is compiled and mapped in a 3D PLR model, presenting inefficiencies and malfunctions that can be resolved if PLRs are addressed within a 3D cadastral context. Stipulations implying restrictions in 3D space within current legislation are presented, along with the restrictions deriving from the absolute character of ownership right, thus highlighting the significance of 3D definition, modeling and recording of PLRs. Full article

One of the major impacts associated with unplanned rapid urban growth is the decrease of urban vegetation, which is often replaced with impervious surfaces such as buildings, parking lots, roads, and pavements. Consequently, as the percentage of impervious surfaces continues to increase at the expense of vegetation cover, surface urban heat island (SUHI) forms and becomes more intense. The Colombo Metropolitan Area (CMA), Sri Lanka, is one of the rapidly urbanizing metropolitan regions in South Asia. In this study, we examined the spatiotemporal variations of land surface temperature (LST) in the CMA in the context of the SUHI phenomenon using Landsat data. More specifically, we examined the relationship of LST with the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and the normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) at three time points (1997, 2007 and 2017). In addition, we also identified environmentally critical areas based on LST and NDVI. We found significant correlations of LST with NDVI (negative) and NDBI (positive) (p < 0.001) across all three time points. Most of the environmentally critical areas are located in the central business district (CBD), near the harbor, across the coastal belt, and along the main transportation network. We recommend that those identified environmentally critical areas be considered in the future urban planning and landscape development of the city. Green spaces can help improve the environmental sustainability of the CMA. Full article

Common goals of sustainable mobility approaches are to reduce the need for travel, to facilitate modal shifts, to decrease trip distances and to improve energy efficiency in the transportation systems. Among these issues, modal shift plays an important role for the adoption of vehicles with fewer or zero emissions. Nowadays, the electric bike (e-bike) is becoming a valid alternative to cars in urban areas. However, to promote modal shift, a better understanding of the mobility behaviour of e-bike users is required. In this paper, we investigate the mobility habits of e-bikers using GPS data collected in Belgium from 2014 to 2015. By analysing more than 10,000 trips, we provide insights about e-bike trip features such as: distance, duration and speed. In addition, we offer a deep look into which routes are preferred by bike owners in terms of their physical characteristics and how weather influences e-bike usage. Results show that trips with higher travel distances are performed during working days and are correlated with higher average speeds. Usage patterns extracted from our data set also indicate that e-bikes are preferred for commuting (home-work) and business (work related) trips rather than for recreational trips. Full article

Land information is one of the basic requirements for land management activities such as land consolidation. However, the dearth of land information on customary lands limits the development and application of land consolidation. This paper presents and discusses the results of an experiment carried out to test the potential of participatory land administration applied on customary lands in support of land consolidation. A brief overview of the evolution of crowdsourced, voluntary, and participatory approaches is provided alongside newly related insights into neogeography and neo-cadastre, and fit-for-purpose and pro-poor land administration. The concept of participatory land administration is then developed in this context. The area of the experiment is in Northern Ghana where the process was developed together with the local farming community. The study involved collecting land information relating to farms over a two-week period, using a mobile app and a satellite image, based on participatory land administration. The results show that Participatory Land Administration can potentially support land consolidation, though further investigation is needed on how it can be integrated into the formal land registration system, into an actual land consolidation project. Full article

Earthquakes are one of the most devastating types of natural disasters, and happen with little to no warning. This study combined Landsat-8 and interferometric ALOS-2 coherence data without training area techniques by classifying the remote sensing ratios of specific features for damage assessment. Waterbodies and highly vegetated areas were extracted by the modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), respectively, from after-earthquake images in order to improve the accuracy of damage maps. Urban areas were classified from pre-event interferometric coherence data. The affected areas from the earthquake were detected with the normalized difference (ND) between the pre- and co-event interferometric coherence. The results presented three damage types; namely, damage to buildings caused by ground motion, liquefaction, and landslides. The overall accuracy (94%) of the confusion matrix was excellent. Results for urban areas were divided into three damage levels (e.g., none–slight, slight–heavy, heavy–destructive) at a high (90%) overall accuracy level. Moreover, data on buildings damaged by liquefaction and landslides were in good agreement with field survey information. Overall, this study illustrates an effective damage assessment mapping approach that can support post-earthquake management activities for future events, especially in areas where geographical data are sparse. Full article

Remote sensing data from multi-source optical and SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) sensors have been widely utilized to detect forest dynamics under a variety of conditions. Due to different temporal coverage, spatial resolution, and spectral characteristics, these sensors usually perform differently from one another. To conduct statistical modeling accuracies evaluation and comparison among several sensors, a linear statistical model was applied in this study for retrieval and comparative analysis based on remote-sensing indices from optical sensors of ALOS AVNIR-2 (Advanced Land Observing Satellite Advanced Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer type 2), Landsat-5 TM (Thematic Mapper), MODIS NBAR (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer Nadir BRDF-Adjusted Reflectance), and the SAR sensor of ALOS PALSAR (Advanced Land Observing Satellite Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar), respectively. This modeling used the forest leaf area index (LAI) as the field measured variable. During modeling, six optical vegetation indices were selected for evaluation and comparison between the three optical sensors, while simultaneously, two radar indices were calculated for the comparison between ALOS AVNIR-2 and PALSAR sensors. The gap between the spatial resolution of remote-sensing data and field plot size can account for the different accuracies found in this study. This study provides a reference for the selection of remote-sensing data types and spatial resolution in specific forest monitoring applications with different data acquisition costs and accuracy needs. Normally, at regional and national scales, remote sensing data with 30 m spatial resolution (e.g., Landsat) could provide significant results in the statistical modelling and retrieval of LAI while the MODIS cannot always meet the requirements. Full article

GlobeLand30 is the world’s first global land cover dataset at 30 m resolution for two epochs, i.e., 2000 and 2010. On the official website, the data are represented by qualitative thematic maps which show the distribution of global land cover, and some proportional symbol maps which are quantitative representations of land cover data. However, researchers have also argued that the cartogram, a kind of value-by-area representation, has some advantages over these maps in some cases, while others doubt their usability because of the possible distortion in shape. This led us to conduct an experimental evaluation of the usability of the cartogram for the representation of GlobeLand30. This experimental evaluation is a comparative analysis between the cartogram and the proportional symbol map to examine which is more effective in various kinds of quantitative analyses. The results show that the thematic map is better than the cartogram for the representation of quantity (e.g., area size), but the cartogram performs better in the representation of tendency distribution and areas’ multiple relationships. The usability of the cartogram is notably affected by map projection and the irregularity in area shapes, but the equal-area projection does not necessarily perform better than equidistance projection, especially at high latitudes. Full article

People in unfamiliar environments often need navigation guidance to reach a destination. Research has found that compared to outdoors, people tend to lose orientation much more easily within complex buildings, such as university buildings and hospitals. This paper proposes a category-based method to generate landmark-based route instructions to support people’s wayfinding activities in unfamiliar indoor environments. Compared to other methods relying on detailed instance-level data about the visual, semantic, and structural characteristics of individual spatial objects, the proposed method relies on commonly available data about categories of spatial objects, which exist in most indoor spatial databases. With this, instructions like “Turn right after the second door, and use the elevator to go to the second floor” can be generated for indoor navigation. A case study with a university campus shows that the method is feasible in generating landmark-based route instructions for indoor navigation. More importantly, compared to metric-based instructions (i.e., the benchmark for indoor navigation), the generated landmark-based instructions can help users to unambiguously identify the correct decision point where a change of direction is needed, as well as offer information for the users to confirm that they are on the right way to the destination. Full article

Planetary science is the study of planets, moons, irregular bodies such as asteroids and the processes that create and modify them. Like terrestrial sciences, planetary science research is heavily dependent on collecting, processing and archiving large quantities of spatial data to support a range of activities. To address the complexity of storing, discovering, accessing, and utilizing spatial data, the terrestrial research community has developed conceptual Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) models and cyberinfrastructures. The needs that these systems seek to address for terrestrial spatial data users are similar to the needs of the planetary science community: spatial data should just work for the non-spatial expert. Here we discuss a path towards a Planetary Spatial Data Infrastructure (PSDI) solution that fulfills this primary need. We first explore the linkage between SDI models and cyberinfrastructures, then describe the gaps in current PSDI concepts, and discuss the overlap between terrestrial SDIs and a new, conceptual PSDI that best serves the needs of the planetary science community. Full article

This study discusses a method for quantitative quality assessment for the simplification of linear features. Considering the multi-scale nature of linear features, this paper combines the improved Douglas–Peucker method without threshold and the multiway tree model to construct a weighted hierarchical linear feature representation model called the Douglas–Peucker Multiway Tree (DMC-tree). Subsequently, the uncertainty computation is conducted from the root of the DMC-Tree top-down level by level to obtain the quality indexes. Then, the quality index of the whole linear feature is obtained by combining the indexes of every layer together with their weights. The results of the presented method are compared with those of the length ratio method and the Hausdorff distance method. The results show the advantages of the presented method over the others, including (1) its sensitivity to feature points of multiple scales, (2) the quantitative characteristics of the indexes, and (3) the finer granularity in assessment. Full article

Abstract:Spatial discontinuity often causes poor accuracy when a single model is used for the surface modeling of soil properties in complex geomorphic areas. Here we present a method for adaptive surface modeling of combined secondary variables to improve prediction accuracy during the interpolation of soil properties (ASM-SP). Using various secondary variables and multiple base interpolation models, ASM-SP was used to interpolate soil K⁺ in a typical complex geomorphic area (Qinghai Lake Basin, China). Five methods, including inverse distance weighting (IDW), ordinary kriging (OK), and OK combined with different secondary variables (e.g., OK-Landuse, OK-Geology, and OK-Soil), were used to validate the proposed method. The mean error (ME), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), mean relative error (MRE), and accuracy (AC) were used as evaluation indicators. Results showed that: (1) The OK interpolation result is spatially smooth and has a weak bull's-eye effect, and the IDW has a stronger ‘bull’s-eye’ effect, relatively. They both have obvious deficiencies in depicting spatial variability of soil K⁺. (2) The methods incorporating combinations of different secondary variables (e.g., ASM-SP, OK-Landuse, OK-Geology, and OK-Soil) were associated with lower estimation bias. Compared with IDW, OK, OK-Landuse, OK-Geology, and OK-Soil, the accuracy of ASM-SP increased by 13.63%, 10.85%, 9.98%, 8.32%, and 7.66%, respectively. Furthermore, ASM-SP was more stable, with lower MEs, MAEs, RMSEs, and MREs. (3) ASM-SP presents more details than others in the abrupt boundary, which can render the result consistent with the true secondary variables. In conclusion, ASM-SP can not only consider the nonlinear relationship between secondary variables and soil properties, but can also adaptively combine the advantages of multiple models, which contributes to making the spatial interpolation of soil K⁺ more reasonable. Full article

Mangroves are valuable contributors to coastal ecosystems, and remote sensing is an indispensable way to obtain knowledge of the dynamics of mangrove ecosystems. Due to the similar spectral features between mangroves and other land cover types, challenges are posed since the accuracy is sometimes unsatisfactory in distinguishing mangroves from other land cover types with traditional classification methods. In this paper, we propose a classification method named the multi-feature joint sparse algorithm (MF-SRU), in which spectral, topographic, and textural features are integrated as the decision-making features, and sparse representation of both center pixels and their eight neighborhood pixels is proposed to represent the spatial correlation of neighboring pixels, which can make good use of the spatial correlation of adjacent pixels. Experiments are performed on Landsat Thematic Mapper multispectral remote sensing imagery in the Zhangjiang estuary in Southeastern China, and the results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the extraction accuracy of mangroves. Full article

Satellite scene classification is challenging because of the high variability inherent in satellite data. Although rapid progress in remote sensing techniques has been witnessed in recent years, the resolution of the available satellite images remains limited compared with the general images acquired using a common camera. On the other hand, a satellite image usually has a greater number of spectral bands than a general image, thereby permitting the multi-spectral analysis of different land materials and promoting low-resolution satellite scene recognition. This study advocates multi-spectral analysis and explores the middle-level statistics of spectral information for satellite scene representation instead of using spatial analysis. This approach is widely utilized in general image and natural scene classification and achieved promising recognition performance for different applications. The proposed multi-spectral analysis firstly learns the multi-spectral prototypes (codebook) for representing any pixel-wise spectral data, and then, based on the learned codebook, a sparse coded spectral vector can be obtained with machine learning techniques. Furthermore, in order to combine the set of coded spectral vectors in a satellite scene image, we propose a hybrid aggregation (pooling) approach, instead of conventional averaging and max pooling, which includes the benefits of the two existing methods, but avoids extremely noisy coded values. Experiments on three satellite datasets validated that the performance of our proposed approach is very impressive compared with the state-of-the-art methods for satellite scene classification. Full article

A comparison of several statistical techniques common in species distribution modeling was developed during this study to evaluate and obtain the statistical model most accurate to predict the distribution of different forest tree species (in our case presence/absence data) according environmental variables. During the process we have developed maximum entropy (MaxEnt), classification and regression trees (CART), multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), showing the statistical basis of each model and, at the same time, we have developed a specific additive model to compare and validate their capability. To compare different results, the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) function (AUC) was used. Every AUC value obtained with those models is significant and all of the models could be useful to represent the distribution of each species. Moreover, the additive model with thin plate splines gave the best results. The worst capability was obtained with MARS. This model’s performance was below average for several species. The additive model developed obtained better results because it allowed for changes and calibrations. In this case we were aware of all of the processes that occurred during the modeling. By contrast, models obtained using specific software, in general, perform like “hermetic machines”, because it could sometimes be impossible to understand the stages that led to the final results. Full article

Seismic site effects are influenced mainly by geospatial uncertainties corresponding to geological or geotechnical spatial variance. Therefore, the development of a geospatial database is essential to characterize site-specific geotechnical information in multiscale areas and to optimize geospatial zonation methods with potentially high degrees of spatial variability based on trial-and-error geostatistical assessments. In this study, a multi-source geospatial information framework, which included the construction of a big data platform, estimation of geostatistical density, optimization of the geostatistical interpolation method, assessment of seismic site effects, and determination of geospatial zonation for decision making, was established. Then, this framework was applied to the Seoul metropolitan area, South Korea. The GIS-based framework was established to develop the geospatial zonation of site-specific seismic site effects before considering the local characteristics of site effects dependent on topographic or geological conditions, based on a geospatial big-data platform in Seoul. The zonal conditions were composed of geo-layers, site effect parameters, and other multi-source geospatial maps for each administrative area, and infrastructure was determined based on the integration of the optimized geoprocessing framework. Full article

We study the problem of morphing two polygons of building footprints at two different scales. This problem frequently occurs during the continuous zooming of interactive maps. The ground plan of a building footprint on a map has orthogonal characteristics, but traditional morphing methods cannot preserve these geographic characteristics at intermediate scales. We attempt to address this issue by presenting a turning angle function-based morphing model (TAFBM) that can generate polygons at an intermediate scale with an identical turning angle for each side. Thus, the orthogonal characteristics can be preserved during the entire interpolation. A case study demonstrates that the model yields good results when applied to data from a building map at various scales. During the continuous generalization, the orthogonal characteristics and their relationships with the spatial direction and topology are well preserved. Full article

The Longzi River Basin in Tibet is located along the edge of the Himalaya Mountains and is characterized by complex geological conditions and numerous landslides. To evaluate the susceptibility of landslide disasters in this area, eight basic factors were analyzed comprehensively in order to obtain a final susceptibility map. The eight factors are the slope angle, slope aspect, plan curvature, distance-to-fault, distance-to-river, topographic relief, annual precipitation, and lithology. Except for the rainfall factor, which was extracted from the grid cell, all the factors were extracted and classified by the slope unit, which is the basic unit in geological disaster development. The eight factors were superimposed using the information content method (ICM), and the weight of each factor was acquired through an analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The sensitivities of the landslides were divided into four categories: low, moderate, high, and very high, respectively, accounting for 22.76%, 38.64%, 27.51%, and 11.09% of the study area. The accuracies of the area under AUC using slope units and grid cells are 82.6% and 84.2%, respectively, and it means that the two methods are accurate in predicting landslide occurrence. The results show that the high and very high susceptibility areas are distributed throughout the vicinity of the river, with a large component in the north as well as a small portion in the middle and the south. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct landslide warnings in these areas, where the rivers are vast and the population is dense. The susceptibility map can reflect the comprehensive risk of each slope unit, which provides an important reference for later detailed investigations, including research and warning studies. Full article