ALBERT

Description: In this paper we present a visual analytics approach for deriving spatio-temporal patterns of collective human mobility from a vast mobile network traffic data set. More than 88 million movements between pairs of radio cells—so-called handovers—served as a proxy for more than two months of mobility within four urban test areas in Northern Italy. In contrast to previous work, our approach relies entirely on visualization and mapping techniques, implemented in several software applications. We purposefully avoid statistical or probabilistic modeling and, nonetheless, reveal characteristic and exceptional mobility patterns. The results show, for example, surprising similarities and symmetries amongst the total mobility and people flows between the test areas. Moreover, the exceptional patterns detected can be associated to real-world events such as soccer matches. We conclude that the visual analytics approach presented can shed new light on large-scale collective urban mobility behavior and thus helps to better understand the “pulse” of dynamic urban systems.

Description: A planning support system for land consolidation has been developed that has, at its heart, an expert system called LandSpaCES (Land Spatial Consolidation Expert System) which contains a “design module” that generates alternative land redistributions under different scenarios and an “evaluation module” which integrates GIS with multi-criteria decision making for assessing these alternatives. This paper introduces the structural framework of the latter module which has been applied using a case study in Cyprus. Two new indices are introduced: the “parcel concentration coefficient” for measuring the dispersion of parcels; and the “landowner satisfaction rate” for predicting the acceptance of the land redistribution plan by the landowners in terms of the location of their new parcels. These two indices are used as criteria for the evaluation of the land redistribution alternatives and are transferable to any land consolidation project. Moreover, a modified version of the ratio estimation procedure, referred to as the “qualitative rating method” for assigning weights to the evaluation criteria, is presented, along with a set of non-linear value functions for standardizing the performance scores of the alternatives and incorporating expert knowledge for five evaluation criteria. The application of the module showed that it is a powerful new tool for the evaluation of alternative land redistribution plans that could be implemented in other countries after appropriate adjustments. A broader contribution has also been made to spatial planning processes, which might follow the methodology and innovations presented in this paper.

Description: : Exempt domestic water well provisions exist in sixteen states and allow landowners to use water wells producing relatively small amounts of water or water wells used for domestic or other specific purposes to avoid certain regulatory requirements. Exempt wells provisions apply mainly in the west, where most states use the prior appropriation rule (“first in time, first in right”) for ground water rights. Critics voice concerns over implications ranging from land use planning to water supply. This article explores existing state regulation and finds that the term “exempt well” is a misnomer. The vast majority of states impose numerous restrictions on exempt wells. Existing regulations include limitations on the quantity, location, and amount of irrigation use. Other provisions address construction standards, required filing of information and other practices. The review of regulations suggests that many steps to mitigate the impact of exempt wells are already in place.

Description: : National attention has turned to a case currently pending before the New Mexico Supreme Court. Bounds v. State of New Mexico involves a facial constitutional challenge to New Mexico's domestic well statute. The Plaintiff, Horace Bounds, claims that the statute, which requires the State Engineer to issue permits to any applicants for domestic purposes, violates the constitutional provision known as the Prior Appropriation Doctrine. The decision of the Court will likely have impacts across the country and beyond the legal realm. This decision could impact the well drilling industry, economic development, and administrative agencies. Numerous other western states have similar exempt well provisions, and the decision by the New Mexico Supreme Court could well lead to litigation or pushes for changes in legislation on other states as well.

Description: : Over the last decade, Montana's fastest growing basins have experienced a surge of reliance on a certain “permit-exempt well loophole,” which enables small ground water diversions to avoid having to go through the regulatory process that determines whether the proposed use would adversely impact senior water users and ground water supply. This loophole has generated significant conflict with senior right owners in areas where exempt wells have provided water for large-scale residential developments. As a partial solution, this article examines ground water mitigation exchanges designed to address similar issues in Washington and presents the 63rd Montana Legislature with recommendations for a Montana pilot project.

Description: : Most western states allow landowners to withdraw certain amounts of groundwater for specified purposes without obtaining a water right permit. As water demands increase in the West, some developers are using exempt wells to supply water to residential developments without acquiring the permits and water rights needed to build public water supply systems. This has led to concerns that the cumulative impact of these wells could impair senior water rights, create environmental problems, and threaten water quality in some areas. This article explores the considerations associated with mitigating exempt well impacts and argues that surgical approaches focused on specific issues and geographic areas (scalpels) are more politically and administratively feasible than broad efforts to repeal or reduce exemptions on a statewide basis (hammers). The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not represent those of the Western States Water Council or its member states.

Description: : The saga over exempt wells in the western United States and Canada epitomizes a new type of water conflict – a spaghetti-western water war. The political melodrama stars local governments to serve as sheriff of water-supply planning duties. Exempt wells number in the millions, and herding the growing numbers is testing the mettle of the states and provinces responsible for the management, allocation, and protection of natural resources. The separation of laws governing ground water and surface water, coupled with changes in geography and geology within a jurisdiction, compound the administrative riddle and give rise to a broad spectrum of conflicts, from differing interpretations of hydrogeologic data, economic impacts associated with increasing the herd, to differing identities associated with the use of ground water from the exempt wells. Despite the political melodrama of exempt wells, there is room and willingness for other trails and paths to keep the herd intact. This paper describes the different breeds of conflicts associated with exempt wells and gives examples of how the mysterious stranger of collaborative decision making processes and water governance systems can ride into town and lead to successful water management and conflict resolution.

Description: : The water management practice of storing water underground for use during dry periods is a very effective technique that has been practiced for a long time. Another water management practice that has been around for a long time is collection of rainwater and storage of rainwater aboce ground. There have been significant advances more recently in our understanding of aquifer geology and technologies used for rainwater harvesting. This article combines our advance in knowledge of storing and recovery water from wells and new rainwater harvesting practices to recharge a low yielding exempt well with treated rainwater. The studies presented in this article demonstrate that exempt wells provide a valuable underground water storage option and may provide a new effective urban water management tool.

Description: Existing models of spatial relations do not consider that different concepts exist on different levels in a hierarchy and in turn that the spatial relations in a given scene are a function of the specific concepts considered. One approach to determining the existence of a particular spatial relation is to compute the corresponding high level concepts explicitly using map generalization before inferring the existence of the spatial relation in question. We explore this idea through the development of a model of the spatial relation “enters” that may exist between a road and a housing estate.

Description: Crowdsourced geodata has been proven to be a rich and major data source for environmental simulations and analysis, as well as the visualization of spatial phenomena. With the increasing size and complexity of public buildings, such as universities or hotels, there is also an increasing demand for information about indoor spaces. Trying to stimulate this growing demand, both researchers and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) communities envision to extend established communities towards indoors. It has already been showcased that VGI from OpenStreetMap (OSM) can be utilized for different applications in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) as well as for simple shortest path computations inside buildings. The here presented research now tries to utilize crowdsourced indoor geodata for more complex indoor routing scenarios of multiple users. Essentially, it will be investigated if, and to what extent, the available data can be utilized for performing indoor evacuation simulations with the simulation framework MATSim. That is, this paper investigates the suitability of crowdsourced indoor information from OSM (IndoorOSM) for evacuation simulations. Additionally, the applicability of MATSim for agent-based indoor evacuation simulations is conducted. The paper discusses the automatic generation simulation-related data, and provides experimental results for two different evacuation scenarios. Furthermore, limitations of the IndoorOSM data and the MATSim framework for indoor evacuation simulations are elaborated and discussed.

Description: This paper explores the patterns of human activities within a geographical space by adopting the taxicab static points which refer to the locations with zero speed along the tracking trajectory. We report the findings from both aggregated and individual aspects. Results from the aggregated level indicate the following: (1) Human activities exhibit an obvious regularity in time, for example, there is a burst of activity during weekend nights and a lull during the week. (2) They show a remarkable spatial drifting pattern, which strengthens our understanding of the activities in any given place. (3) Activities are heterogeneous in space irrespective of their drifting with time. These aggregated results not only help in city planning, but also facilitate traffic control and management. On the other hand, investigations on an individual level suggest that (4) activities witnessed by one taxicab will have different temporal regularity to another, and (5) each regularity implies a high level of prediction with low entropy by applying the Lempel-Ziv algorithm.

Description: Several tasks in urban and architectural design are today undertaken in a geospatial context. Building Information Models (BIM) and geospatial technologies offer 3D data models that provide information about buildings and the surrounding environment. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and CityGML are today the two most prominent semantic models for representation of BIM and geospatial models respectively. CityGML has emerged as a standard for modeling city models while IFC has been developed as a reference model for building objects and sites. Current CAD and geospatial software provide tools that allow the conversion of information from one format to the other. These tools are however fairly limited in their capabilities, often resulting in data and information losses in the transformations. This paper describes a new approach for data integration based on a unified building model (UBM) which encapsulates both the CityGML and IFC models, thus avoiding translations between the models and loss of information. To build the UBM, all classes and related concepts were initially collected from both models, overlapping concepts were merged, new objects were created to ensure the capturing of both indoor and outdoor objects, and finally, spatial relationships between the objects were redefined. Unified Modeling Language (UML) notations were used for representing its objects and relationships between them. There are two use-case scenarios, both set in a hospital: “evacuation” and “allocating spaces for patient wards” were developed to validate and test the proposed UBM data model. Based on these two scenarios, four validation queries were defined in order to validate the appropriateness of the proposed unified building model. It has been validated, through the case scenarios and four queries, that the UBM being developed is able to integrate CityGML data as well as IFC data in an apparently seamless way. Constraints and enrichment functions are used for populating empty database tables and fields. The motivation scenarios also show the needs and benefits of having an integrated approach to the modeling of indoor and outdoor spatial features.

Description: In Brazil, plantations of exotic species such as Eucalyptus have expanded substantially in recent years, due in large part to the great demand for cellulose and wood. The combination of the steep slopes in some of these regions, such as the municipalities located close to the Serra do Mar and Serra da Mantiqueira, and the soil exposure that occurs in some stages in the Eucalyptus cultivation cycle, can cause landslides. The use of a geographic information system (GIS) assists with the identification of areas that are susceptible to landslides, and one of the GIS tools used is the spatial inference technique. In this work, the landslide susceptibility of areas occupied by Eucalyptus plantations in different stages of development in municipalities in the state of São Paulo was examined. Eight thematic maps were used, and, the fuzzy gamma technique was used for data integration and the generation of susceptibility maps, in which scenarios were created with different gamma values for the dry and rainy seasons. The results for areas planted with Eucalyptus were compared with those obtained for other land uses and covers. In the moderate and high susceptibility classes, the pasture is the land use type that presented the greatest susceptibility, followed by new Eucalyptus plantations and urban areas.

Description: Given high urbanization rates and increasing spatio-temporal variability in many present-day cities, exposure information is often out-of-date, highly aggregated or spatially fragmented, increasing the uncertainties associated with seismic risk assessments. This work therefore aims at using space-based technologies to estimate, complement and extend exposure data at multiple scales, over large areas and at a comparatively low cost for the case of the city of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. At a neighborhood scale, an analysis of urban structures using medium-resolution optical satellite images is performed. Applying image classification and change-detection analysis to a time-series of Landsat images, the urban environment can be delineated into areas of relatively homogeneous urban structure types, which can provide a first estimate of an exposed building stock (e.g., approximate age of structures, composition and distribution of predominant building types). At a building-by-building scale, a more detailed analysis of the exposed building stock is carried out using a high-resolution Quickbird image. Furthermore, the multi-resolution datasets are combined with census data to disaggregate population statistics. The tools used within this study are being developed on a free- and open-source basis and aim at being transparent, usable and transferable.

Description: Defined in the early 1990s for use with gridded satellite passive microwave data, the Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid (EASE-Grid) was quickly adopted and used for distribution of a variety of satellite and in situ data sets. Conceptually easy to understand, EASE-Grid suffers from limitations that make it impossible to format in the widely popular GeoTIFF convention without reprojection. Importing EASE-Grid data into standard mapping software packages is nontrivial and error-prone. This article defines a standard for an improved EASE-Grid 2.0 definition, addressing how the changes rectify issues with the original grid definition. Data distributed using the EASE-Grid 2.0 standard will be easier for users to import into standard software packages and will minimize common reprojection errors that users had encountered with the original EASE-Grid definition.

Description: All things in our world are related to some location in space and time, and according to Tobler’s first law of geography “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” [1]. Since humans exist they have been contemplating about space and time and have tried to depict and manage the geographic space they live in. We know graphic representations of the land from various regions of the world dating back several thousands of years. The processing and analysis of spatial data has a long history in the disciplines that deal with spatial data such as geography, surveying engineering, cartography, photogrammetry, and remote sensing. Until recently, all these activities have been analog in nature; only since the invention of the computer in the second half of the 20th century and the use of computers for the acquisition, storage, analysis, and display of spatial data starting in the 1960s we speak of geo-information and geo-information systems. [...]

Description: Analysis of spatial and temporal changes of vegetation cover using remote sensing (RS) technology, in conjunction with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), is becoming increasingly important in environmental conservation. The objective of this study was to use RS data and GIS techniques to assess the vegetation cover in 1989 and 2009, in the barangays (smallest administrative units) of the city of San Fernando, La Union, the Philippines, for planning vegetation rehabilitation. Landsat images were used to prepare both the 1989 and 2009 land cover maps, which were then used to detect changes in the vegetation cover for the barangays. In addition to conventional accuracy assessment parameters such as; proportion correct, and standard Kappa index of agreement, two other parameters; quantity, and allocation disagreements were used to assess the accuracy of the land cover classification. Results revealed that there were gains and losses of vegetation cover in most of the barangays, but overall vegetation cover increased by 11% (around 625 ha) based on the original extent of 1989. Those barangays that showed substantial net losses in vegetation cover need to be prioritised for rehabilitation planning. As exemplified in this study, the collection, processing and analysis of relevant RS and GIS information, can facilitate priority-setting in the planning of environmental rehabilitation and conservation by the local government at both city and barangay levels.

Description: The primary objective of this research is to predict and analyze the future urban growth of Dhaka City using the Landsat satellite images of 1989, 1999 and 2009. Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) and its surrounding impact areas have been selected as the study area. At the beginning, a fisher supervised classification method has been applied to prepare the base maps with five land cover classes. In the next stage, three different models have been implemented to simulate the land cover map of Dhaka city of 2009. These have been named as “Stochastic Markov (St_Markov)” Model, “Cellular Automata Markov (CA_Markov)” Model and “Multi Layer Perceptron Markov (MLP_Markov)” Model. Then the best-fitted model has been selected by implementing a method to compare land cover categories in three maps: a reference map of time 1, a reference map of time 2 and a simulation map of time 2. This is how the “Multi Layer Perceptron Markov (MLP_Markov)” Model has been qualified as the most appropriate model for this research. Later, using the MLP_Markov model, the land cover map of 2019 has been predicted. The MLP_Markov model extrapolates that built-up area increases from 46% to 58% of the total study area during 2009–2019.

Description: The primary objective of this research is to predict and analyze the future urban growth of Dhaka City using the Landsat satellite images of 1989, 1999 and 2009. Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) and its surrounding impact areas have been selected as the study area. At the beginning, a fisher supervised classification method has been applied to prepare the base maps with five land cover classes. In the next stage, three different models have been implemented to simulate the land cover map of Dhaka city of 2009. These have been named as “Stochastic Markov (St_Markov)” Model, “Cellular Automata Markov (CA_Markov)” Model and “Multi Layer Perceptron Markov (MLP_Markov)” Model. Then the best-fitted model has been selected by implementing a method to compare land cover categories in three maps: a reference map of time 1, a reference map of time 2 and a simulation map of time 2. This is how the “Multi Layer Perceptron Markov (MLP_Markov)” Model has been qualified as the most appropriate model for this research. Later, using the MLP_Markov model, the land cover map of 2019 has been predicted. The MLP_Markov model extrapolates that built-up area increases from 46% to 58% of the total study area during 2009–2019.

Description: Defined in the early 1990s for use with gridded satellite passive microwave data, the Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid (EASE-Grid) was quickly adopted and used for distribution of a variety of satellite and in situ data sets. Conceptually easy to understand, EASE-Grid suffers from limitations that make it impossible to format in the widely popular GeoTIFF convention without reprojection. Importing EASE-Grid data into standard mapping software packages is nontrivial and error-prone. This article defines a standard for an improved EASE-Grid 2.0 definition, addressing how the changes rectify issues with the original grid definition. Data distributed using the EASE-Grid 2.0 standard will be easier for users to import into standard software packages and will minimize common reprojection errors that users had encountered with the original EASE-Grid definition.

Description: All things in our world are related to some location in space and time, and according to Tobler’s first law of geography “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” [1]. Since humans exist they have been contemplating about space and time and have tried to depict and manage the geographic space they live in. We know graphic representations of the land from various regions of the world dating back several thousands of years. The processing and analysis of spatial data has a long history in the disciplines that deal with spatial data such as geography, surveying engineering, cartography, photogrammetry, and remote sensing. Until recently, all these activities have been analog in nature; only since the invention of the computer in the second half of the 20th century and the use of computers for the acquisition, storage, analysis, and display of spatial data starting in the 1960s we speak of geo-information and geo-information systems. [...]

Description: Analysis of spatial and temporal changes of vegetation cover using remote sensing (RS) technology, in conjunction with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), is becoming increasingly important in environmental conservation. The objective of this study was to use RS data and GIS techniques to assess the vegetation cover in 1989 and 2009, in the barangays (smallest administrative units) of the city of San Fernando, La Union, the Philippines, for planning vegetation rehabilitation. Landsat images were used to prepare both the 1989 and 2009 land cover maps, which were then used to detect changes in the vegetation cover for the barangays. In addition to conventional accuracy assessment parameters such as; proportion correct, and standard Kappa index of agreement, two other parameters; quantity, and allocation disagreements were used to assess the accuracy of the land cover classification. Results revealed that there were gains and losses of vegetation cover in most of the barangays, but overall vegetation cover increased by 11% (around 625 ha) based on the original extent of 1989. Those barangays that showed substantial net losses in vegetation cover need to be prioritised for rehabilitation planning. As exemplified in this study, the collection, processing and analysis of relevant RS and GIS information, can facilitate priority-setting in the planning of environmental rehabilitation and conservation by the local government at both city and barangay levels.

Description: The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, founded in 2004, has gathered an exceptional amount of interest in recent years and counts as one of the most impressive sources of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) on the Internet. In total, more than half a million members had registered for the project by the end of 2011. However, while this number of contributors seems impressive, questions remain about the individual contributions that have been made by the project members. This research article contains several studies regarding the contributions by the community of the project. The results show that only 38% (192,000) of the registered members carried out at least one edit in the OSM database and that only 5% (24,000) of all members actively contributed to the project in a more productive way. The majority of the members are located in Europe (72%) and each member has an activity area whose size may range from one soccer field up to more than 50 km2. In addition to several more analyses conducted for this article, predictions will be made about how this newly acquired knowledge can be used for future research.

Description: Delineation of commuting regions has always been based on statistical units, often municipalities or wards. However, using these units has certain disadvantages as their land areas differ considerably. Much information is lost in the larger spatial base units and distortions in self-containment values, the main criterion in rule-based delineation procedures, occur. Alternatively, one can start from relatively small standard size units such as hexagons. In this way, much greater detail in spatial patterns is obtained. In this paper, regions are built by means of intrazonal maximization (Intramax) on the basis of hexagons. The use of geoprocessing tools, specifically developed for the processing of commuting data, speeds up processing time considerably. The results of the Intramax analysis are evaluated with travel-to-work area constraints, and comparisons are made with commuting fields, accessibility to employment, commuting flow density and network commuting flow size. From selected steps in the regionalization process, a hierarchy of nested commuting regions emerges, revealing the complexity of commuting patterns.

Description: Changes to stems caused by natural forces and timber harvesting constitute an essential input for many forestry-related applications and ecological studies, especially forestry inventories based on the use of permanent sample plots. Conventional field measurement is widely acknowledged as being time-consuming and labor-intensive. More automated and efficient alternatives or supportive methods are needed. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) has been demonstrated to be a promising method in forestry field inventories. Nevertheless, the applicability of TLS in recording changes in the structure of forest plots has not been studied in detail. This paper presents a fully automated method for detecting changes in forest structure over time using bi-temporal TLS data. The developed method was tested on five densely populated forest plots including 137 trees and 50 harvested trees in point clouds. The present study demonstrated that 90 percent of tree stem changes could be automatically located from single-scan TLS data. These changes accounted for 92 percent of the changed basal area. The results indicate that the processing of TLS data collected at different times to detect tree stem changes can be fully automated.

Description: For most of the last decade, the south-western portion of the United States has experienced a severe and enduring drought. This has caused serious concerns about water supply and management in the region. In this research, 30 orthorectified Landsat satellite images from the United States Geological Service (USGS) Earth Explorer archive were analyzed for the 1972 to 2009 period. The images encompassed Lake Mead (a major reservoir in this region) and were examined for changes in water surface area. Decadal lake area minimums/maximums were achieved in 1972/1979, 1981/1988, 1991/1998, and 2009/2000. The minimum lake area extent occurred in 2009 (356.4 km2), while the maximum occurred in 1998 (590.6 km2). Variable trends in water level and lake area were observed throughout the analysis period, however progressively lower values were observed since 2000. The Landsat derived lake areas show a very strong relationship with actual measured water levels at the Hoover Dam. Yearly water level variations at the dam vary minimally from the satellite derived estimates. A complete (yearly) record of satellite images may have helped to reduce the slight deviations in the time series.

Description: This paper discusses the use of spatial data for risk and natural disaster management. The importance of remote-sensing (RS), Geographic Information System (GIS) and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data is stressed by comparing studies of the use of these technologies for natural disaster management. Spatial data sharing is discussed in the context of the establishment of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) for natural disasters. Some examples of SDI application in disaster management are analyzed, and the need for participation from organizations and governments to facilitate the exchange of information and to improve preventive and emergency plans is reinforced. Additionally, the potential involvement of citizens in the risk and disaster management process by providing voluntary data collected from volunteered geographic information (VGI) applications is explored. A model relating all of the spatial data-sharing aspects discussed in the article was suggested to elucidate the importance of the issues raised.

Description: Intensity-Hue-Saturation (IHS), Brovey Transform (BT), and Smoothing-Filter-Based-Intensity Modulation (SFIM) algorithms were used to pansharpen GeoEye-1 imagery. The pansharpened images were then segmented in Berkeley Image Seg using a wide range of segmentation parameters, and the spatial and spectral accuracy of image segments was measured. We found that pansharpening algorithms that preserve more of the spatial information of the higher resolution panchromatic image band (i.e., IHS and BT) led to more spatially-accurate segmentations, while pansharpening algorithms that minimize the distortion of spectral information of the lower resolution multispectral image bands (i.e., SFIM) led to more spectrally-accurate image segments. Based on these findings, we developed a new IHS-SFIM combination approach, specifically for object-based image analysis (OBIA), which combined the better spatial information of IHS and the more accurate spectral information of SFIM to produce image segments with very high spatial and spectral accuracy.

Description: The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, a well-known source of freely available worldwide geodata collected by volunteers, has experienced a consistent increase in popularity in recent years. One of the main caveats that is closely related to this popularity increase is different types of vandalism that occur in the projects database. Since the applicability and reliability of crowd-sourced geodata, as well as the success of the whole community, are heavily affected by such cases of vandalism, it is essential to counteract those occurrences. The question, however, is: How can the OSM project protect itself against data vandalism? To be able to give a sophisticated answer to this question, different cases of vandalism in the OSM project have been analyzed in detail. Furthermore, the current OSM database and its contributions have been investigated by applying a variety of tests based on other Web 2.0 vandalism detection tools. The results gathered from these prior steps were used to develop a rule-based system for the automated detection of vandalism in OSM. The developed prototype provides useful information about the vandalism types and their impact on the OSM project data.