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Underwater survey, compared to land archaeology, needs some specific techniques, because the application of some active 3D sensor, such as laser scanner, is obviously impossible. The necessity to produce three-dimensional survey, offering the same accuracy of classical terrestrial laserscanning or photogrammetric methods, combined with the request of low costs and rapid solutions, led the researchers to test and apply oftentimes image-based techniques. In the last two years the Ca' Foscari University and University IUAV of Venice are conducting a research on the application of integrated techniques to support underwater metric documentation, comparing them to the manual traditional one. The gained experience (and confirmed by other recently published papers) shows that the actual multiimage digital photogrammetry is a good solution for the underwater archaeology. This approach is useful both from a metric and from a recording point of view, because it achieves high quality results, such as accurate 3D models or 2D representations, offering a complete documentation of underwater sites. But photogrammetry has to be supported by a topographical survey (to acquire ground control points - GCP) to georeference all the finds in the same reference system. This paper presents the integrated survey of two roman shipwrecks, approaching differently in the GCP’s acquisition just for the different morphological characteristic of the sites. The wrecks’ cargos are huge marble blocks, presenting differences in quantities, layout and depths. Those characteristics determine the choice of the topographic survey. The results of the survey are two 3D polygonal textured models of the sites, which can be easily used for different analyses and reconstructive hypothesis, opening new possibilities of documentation with both specialists and the wider public. Furthermore, 3D models are the geometric base for 2D orthophoto and cross section extraction. The paper will illustrate all the phases regarding the survey’s design, acquisition and realization and the data processing to obtain 2D and 3D final representation.

As one of key factors which control the spatial soil variation in soil-landscape model, terrain information includes not only topographic attributes (such as slope gradient, curvature, etc.) but also information of slope positions. But the spatial gradation of slope positions is still not quantitatively considered in current predictive soil mapping and other related application areas. The issue of this paper is to make a primary discussion on the potential role of spatial gradation of slope positions in soil-landscape model. Taking a study area in Northeast China and a detailed taxonomy of slope position, this paper firstly utilized a fuzzy inference approach based on similarity to the typical locations to quantify the spatial gradation between slope positions. Secondly, we took use of the soil-subgroup map in study area to analyze whether there is an evident relationship between soil distribution and spatial gradation of slope positions or not, by means of the statistics on the percentage of slope positions on where each soil subgroup in study area is distributed. The results show that the distributions between slope positions and soil subgroups are clearly correlative in the areas where fuzziness as one certain slope position is little. And the soil distribution shows obvious intergradation and uncertainty in areas where the slope position is identified with much ambiguity. The evident relationship between soil distribution and spatial gradation of slope positions indicates that the quantitative information of spatial gradation of slope positions should be included into both soil-landscape model and its applications (e.g., digital soil mapping, etc.), for a better depiction on the co-variation between slope positions and soil type.

In this paper, brightness temperature (Tb), normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) and normalized difference vegetion index (NDVI) were quantitatively derived from Landsat TM images of Beijing City. Feature profiles of Tb, NDBI and NDVI were drawn in the directions of NE-SW and NW-SE using the technologies of RS and GIS. Laws of spatial distribution of the relationships between Tb and NDBI, Tb and NDVI were discussed. The results showed that: 1) there is a significant positive correlation between Tb and NDBI, and a significant negetive correlation between Tb and NDVI. 2) The less distance between the other profiles and the central profile is, the stronger the negative correlation between Tb and NDVI is, the stronger the positive correlation between Tb and NDBI is. 3) The relationship between Tb and NDBI, Tb and NDVI is affected by the complexity of land use structures. The more complex the land use structure is, the stronger the relationship between Tb and NDBI, Tb and NDVI of feature profile are. This paper effectively reveals the spatial correlations between temperature and building and vegetion, and thus can provide certain scientific supports for Beijing's urban and greenland planning in the future.

To further explore the intrinsic mechanism of urban expansion, this paper was mainly related to natural geographical factors on urban expansion based on MSS and TM multi-spectral remote sensing image of the 34 provincial capital level cities in China from 1975 to 2005. With the help of MATLAB, SPSS and ARCGIS, the methods that the principal component factor analysis, correlation analysis, and meanwhile overlay analysis had been used. And the results showed that the natural geographical conditions of Chinese cities had a deep effect on their urban expansion. Firstly, mountainous cities were limited by the terrain that their expansion rate was lower than that of the cities in the plain. At the same time, with average altitude increasing, urban expansion rate had a tendency of decreasing. The spatial and temporal changes of urban expansion were bound up with the average slope of the province. And the speed of urban expansion varied greatly on different levels of slope. Secondly, urban expansion showed distinct characteristics respectively in different weather conditions. Correspondingly, the temperature, precipitation and sunshine hours were selected as different grade reference factors to analyze urban expansion characteristics. Thirdly, analysis on the relationship between the hydrological and urban expansion had been done. In conclusion, this paper had made a try on the study of natural geographical factors on urban expansion. And it had an important practical significance to classify different cities with natural environmental indicators.

The subject intersection becomes a hot research topic recently. This paper tried to couple the Bibliometrics and Geographical Information System (GIS) technologies for studying on the spatial information mining and visualization from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau's literature. All the literatures about Qinghai-Tibet Plateau research were indexed in the ISI Web of Knowledge. The statistical tables about the authors were extracted from the papers by using the method of bibliometrics. The spatial information of the author's countries was linked with the GIS database. The spatial distribution was presented by the format of maps based on the GIS technologies. Comparing with the regular presentation forms of the bibliometrical analysis, the spatial distribution maps can afford more abundant and intuitive senses for the users.

This paper analyses marine delimitation theories of Midline (Mid-axis) and Scale line according to the definition of midline provided by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLS). The authors discuss some faults of midline method and point out that the tendency of marine delimitation technolo gy will be all-shaped scale line method on the Earth ellipsoidal surface. In the end of the paper, the authors introduce their foundational researches on midline and scale line methods based on Map Algebra. Midline, scale line, mid-axis, metric space, Voronoi, Map Algebra Marine delimitation is an affair related to the fair division of important benefits among States. It is a complex system that related with the fields of law, history, politics and geography . Its solution fairly depends on the technologic development of geology, mathematics, ocean and mapping. The most important are the theory and technology of delimitation. How to choose the right theory and technology has been the focus of politicians, lawyers, scientists and the world community

The information referring to Digital Basin includes various water recourse information, spatial information of river basin and other socioeconomic statistics information corresponding with them. This data scatters in different administrative authorities and it has the property of large quantity, isomerous and multiple dimensions. However, China's administration departments are separated. In the original data copy the way to construct grand unified Digital Basin will never stride forward substantially. This paper analyzes the sharing patterns of Digital Basin information, and investigates the possibility to share basin information with current technology. The author then proposes a specific thread and makes an experiment for the sharing of Digital Basin information with the Qinhuai River basin data to explain the correctness and effectiveness of the method brought in this paper.

High-quality spatially referenced population information plays an important role in many social-demographic fields. This paper focuses on grid transformation method for population data by combining geographic factors and simulated township boundary adjustment. Given the location, area and census data of each town-level administrative unit and national base map (1: 25000) in China, 1km*1km gridded population data can be acquired after interpolation and several adjustments. Besides the adjustment based on geographical factors like topography, transport (roads), rivers and settlements, a new adjustment method based on township boundary simulation and total population of the town is proposed in this paper. The Voronoi polygon of town point is generated and rasterized into 1km*1km grids. Considering the area of each township and boundary line of the corresponding country, the collapse or expansion process of the rasterized Voronoi polygon is conducted pixel by pixel to minimize the differences between total count of grids with same township ID and the announced area of the corresponding township iteratively. After boundary simulation, gridded population data is adjusted based on town-level census data. The study indicated that the proposed method can acquire fine-grained grid population surface. It is demonstrated as an effective method to transform census population data into regular grids.

This paper studies the urban spatial expansion of Xi'an City, the capital of Shaanxi Province of China, focusing on the temporal and spatial characteristics of the urban expansion during 1930-2002. Choosing Xian's built-up area as the study object and taking the geographic information system as the technical support, the paper establishes a series of Geoinformation Tupu to reflect the city expansion based on the Geo-information Tupu methods and multi-time remote sensing images, historical graphic document and data. It is proved that the spatial expansion had been expanding all the 70 years of 1930-2002 with different scales, paces, and directions. The build-up areas in Xi'an City had been growing outwards from inside circle basing on the ancient city with two expansion peaks and one nadir. By temporal analysis, it is founded that, firstly, the city expanded from east to west, then from north to south and finally from the center to outsides.

Multi-temporal land use data, circa 1990 and 2000, have been analyzed an our urban growth model which identifies three levels of the urban extent - the impervious surface, the urbanized area, and the urban footprint - to account for the differing degrees of open space degradation associated with the city. The model also generates metrics such as cohesion, proximity, population densities, average openness, open space contiguity, and depth which quantify spatial characteristics that are indicative of urban sprawl. We plan on expanding this time-series further, and for additional cities, with mid-decadal, gap-filled Landsat ETM data, as well as resolution-enhanced Landsat MSS data from the 19070's. The cities used in this pilot project consisted of: (a) Kigali, Rwanda; (b) Portland, Oregon; (c) Tacoma, Washington; and (d) Plock, Poland. Based on research done in this project, complemented by results from other efforts, the Ehlers data fusion approach was used in the resolution enhancement of Landsat MSS imagery. In this paper, using Portland and Kigali as the principal examples, we discuss the procedures by which (a) the KH-series declassified military intelligence imagery was geometrically-corrected and registered to Landsat data, (b) the Ehlers Fusion of the KH-data with Landsat MSS, (c) the derivation of 1970's urban land use information, and (d) the calculation of select urban growth metrics. This paper illustrates the power of leveraging the high resolution of the military reconnaissance imagery with the multispectral information contained in the vintage Landsat MSS data in historical land use analyses.

The paper describes application of the subsurface GPR sensing in the area of "Kirilov" Church (Ukraine, Kiev) to determine the moisture and the structure of the underground soil layers under the church. Sensing was performed with the use of Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave (SFCW) signals with frequency band from 130 up to 270 MHz. The sensing results showing soil moisturizing level received using the signals' phase structure are shown in the paper. Based on these results conclusions about the reasons of church building deformations can be used when developing engineering activities to prevent these deformations.

In this paper a new remote sensor on board HJ-1 satellite was used to extract information on landscape destruction. Based on post-earthquake HJ-1 CCD image, landscape change in the Wenchuan earthquake stricken area were recorded. It showed evidence that the spatial distribution of landscape destruction intensified significantly in the valleys of the Min River. Airborne remote sensing with its flexibility and high-resolution can achieve highly accurate natural landscape destruction information by means of human-computer interaction. Landscape change map in the earthquake area by airborne image could be utilized as validation data. Landscape change result obtained by HJ-1 CCD sensor has the relative error of about 16.2% less than that by ADS40 airborne images. This paper also discussed the correction method of landscape change detection using HJ-1 CCD image. The conclusion of this study is that HJ-1 CCD sensor has a great potential in monitoring and assessment of natural hazards.

According to the assignment of land use survey in Lugu lake region based on multispectral remote sensing, firstly, this paper introduces the methods of remote sensing image enhancement, correction, fusion, interpretation and classification based on the SPOT-5 panchromatic wave band and ASTER multispectral data, secondly, statistics and analysis about the land types of the study region have been done, and evaluates the precision of the fused image classification result based on the judgment error matrix. Finally, this paper briefly evaluates the land use degree and ecological environment of the study region and points out the potential of multispectral remote sensing applied in land use survey.

Prediction of farmland change is a basic work of farmland protection, and also provides basic data for land use planning. According to non-linear characteristic of farmland change, a new method which employs Cellular Automata and Logistic Regression Model to simulate and predict farmland change is discussed in this paper, and structure of Logistic-CA Model and parameters calculation are analyzed. And then, taking Xiantao City as a case, Logistic-CA Model mentioned in this paper was applied to simulate and predict farmland change in this area. Results show: (1)Logistic-CA Model can get rid of disadvantages of traditional mathematic models and get higher accuracy in farmland change prediction; (2)Logistic-CA Model can not only predict quantitative change of farmland, but also simulate pattern evolvement of farmland; (3)Logistic-CA Model can simulate and predict farmland change in various scenarios, and give evidences for establishing policies to protect farmland.

The land resource in the mining area has been destroyed badly, therefore to establish a land reclamation information system of mining area based on GIS is of great significance. The spatial information database of land reclamation is a temporal one due to the change of the land resource within the coal mining area. On the basis of the analysis of the characteristics of the land resource in the subsidence region and the advantage of Event-based and Feature-Based Spatio-temporal Data Model, a spatio-temporal data model based on feature and time-varying sequence of events was proposed in this paper, and this model can be used to manage the land information in the mining area. Meanwhile, the spatial information query and the analytic method were also studied in this paper. The advantage of this model is to keep the integrality of feature entity and to connect ground surface event and underground mining event which cause the land information change in the mining area.

The sprawl process in the metropolitan area of the Baltimore-Washington is a typical Bi-polar growing process among corridors. This paper studies the urbanization of Baltimore-Washington region within 200 years. By using the GIS software Mapinfo7.0, we gained the ratio changes of urbanized area to non-urbanized area and the radii of incircle and circumcircle of two regions. Then we took the former as integrated study and the latter as contrastive study. We find that the metropolitan growth has a 30-40-year cycle phenomenon. Both core growth and corridor growth form the urban expansion of Baltimore and Washington, but each of them has different rates and characteristics. This process can be described as "point-line-net-surface growth model". And the urban growth of Baltimore is better than Washington. Usually, traditional studies of spatial sprawls of Bi-polar of growth with Corridor Structures take the Bi-polar of growth with Corridor Structures as a whole to study the expanding process, while this paper tries to reveal the law of the spatial growth of Bi-polar of growth with Corridor Structures by contrasting the growths of cores, the growths of corridors and the growths of core and corridor in two regions. Moreover, this study is built on the GIS platform and takes the GIS as a research base by using GIS software to access and processing of remote sensing data. At the same time, the paper uses the ecological processes model to carry out quantitative study to deepen its understanding on the Bi-polar growing with corridors structure, and this will conducive to scientific urban and regional planning.

Study on spatial distribution of geospatial industry is essential for industrial layout. By choosing the typical industry index for each industrial branch, sorting, scoring and calculating by weight, this paper calculates out the value of spatial distribution index for each province which quantitatively reflects the status of spatial distribution of geospatial industry in China. According to the index value, five levels of provinces are divided: the leading provinces, the well-developed provinces, the better developed provinces, the developing provinces and the under-developed provinces. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the spatial diffusion process of the geospatial technology in China, as well as the influence factors for each industry branches, and try to find out the reason of the current status of spatial distribution in China.

This paper aims to study the characteristics and spatial distribution of water network in Beijing-Tianjin region of China based on the complex network theory. Through construction of the weighted degree distribution model and clustering coefficient model, it is found that the network of natural rivers and the artificial channel are different network systems. The former tends to be a Scale-Free network which has power-law degree distribution with a bigger clustering coefficient, while the latter owns Random network features which has Poisson-oriented degree distribution with a smaller clustering coefficient. As the major role of natural river network, the water network of Beijing-Tianjin region tends to be a Scale-free network, which means that there must be a few significant nodes and areas that dominate the ecological and economic security of the whole region. Hence this paper also interpolates the degree of nodes by using the Kriging Interpolation function of ArcGIS9.0, and then the spatial distribution map of the nodes of water network in Beijing-Tianjin region was gained, showing that the significant nodes of water network mainly locate in Southeast area of Tianjin region and Northeast area of Beijing region.

Pedestrian are one main component in urban space, and it's they that influence and determine urban layout. Spatial visibility analysis is a novel method in urban morphology and spatial configuration. Spatial visibility analysis in urban morphology mainly studies on spatial features (street network for instance) in the city configuration and visibility with humans in it. Through building the visibility of urban space, we can predict pedestrians flow movement trends to analyze the spatial modes. We hypothesis individuals move on street network and change their ways of movement at road crosses with viewshed directions. We can apply the isovist or viewshed to direct their behaviors, and we can analyze the distribution of pedestrian flows potentially. In urban planning, the distribution of facility locations must be consistent with pedestrian flows, and we can offer the estimate through the approach above. The paper first discusses the principle of pedestrian behaviors based on viewshed and the concepts of visibility centricity, then quantifies the parameters of visibility analysis on viewpoints to explore urban morphology of street network of WUHAN ZHONGNAN district. We extract the viewpoints with higher value and draw their distribution map. At the same time we survey the pedestrian facilities locations in city. This paper reveals the consistent relationship between them and demonstrates the influences of geometric features on pedestrian facilities locations over metropolitan's areas based one visibility analysis.

Rapid urbanization took place in the Pearl River Delta of south China since 1980. Although drastic land use change took place in very short interval within this area, hardly any research has been done on this phenomenon for lacking of available data. Remote sensing is presently the most favorable observation method for land use and land cover change (LUCC) researches. While located in the south of China, the Pearl River Delta suffers from heavy cloud cover for more than half of the year. This makes real-time LUCC monitoring and change detection almost impossible with commonly used optical remote sensing data. In this paper, the orbital highest resolution SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) data - Fine Mode Radarsat data was used for trail of short-term land use change detection. Three scenes of repeat-pass Radarsat data was collected over the study area. Although repeat-pass Radarsat enable continuous land use monitoring under all weather condition, images acquired during different time are inevitably affected by seasonal land cover change and variable environmental status such as air humidity and raining. Besides, some significant observation bias might be induced because of the platform and sensor instability. All these variations and instability made short-term land use change detection quite a perplex problem. In this paper, short-term land use change caused by human activity was considered as abnormal phenomena in both spatial and temporal domain in time series images. And a Density-based Anomaly Detection (DBAD) algorithm was designed to detect abnormally changed land parcels in time series Radarsat images. Firstly, totally 3 scenes of fine mode Radarsat images were collected in the study area from January 1st to May 3rd, 2006. Simply stacked temporal images reveal apparent backscattering variation between the three scenes of images, which mainly owes to the fast vegetable growth during the observation period. Then image segmentation was done on the multi-temporal Radarsat images and object features including mean value of backscattering coefficient (Mean), minimal value of backscattering (Min), homogeneity of gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCMhomo) and dissimilarity of gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCMdis) were extracted basing on segmented image objects. After that change-vector was constructed for each land objects. In the third step DBAD algorithm was applied to the change vector dataset to detect anomaly change in the 3 scenes of images. Finally field surveying data plus manual interpretation were used for validation. Comparing with object-based image regression method, DBAD results in better accuracy. Besides, data validation also shows that DBAD have better accuracy in both under-constructed area and newly built up area (error lower than 12%). While for built up area and some mixed used area, it gains relatively lower accuracy than other land types (from 10% to 28.57%). To conclude, short-term land use change in time series images could be defined as spatial and temporal anomaly in remote sensing images. By extending traditional anomaly detection to spatial-temporal anomaly detection, land use change caused by human activity could be effectively detected during short time intervals. The algorithm DBAD focus only on the density of change vectors in feature space, which is independent of the amplitude and direction of change vectors. This enable DBAD effectively discriminate temporal image variation caused by observation system, environment or seasonal land cover change, especially in vegetation and cultivated area which changed remarkably during the observation period, from land use change caused by human activities. This helps to decrease the false alarming in short-term change detection.

As one of the most important aquatic products raising bases of Guangdong province in China, Zhelin Bay has experienced high intensity of exploitation and utilization during the recent decades. This paper aims at the dynamic change of Zhelin Bay, multi-source data of digital land use map, topographical map, and geomorphological map of the National Coastal Survey of china in 1980s, Landsat TM satellite imagery obtained in 2000, land use data in 2000, as well as SPOT imagery and land use data from the newly National 908 Remote Sensing Survey were used. The data were preprocessed in a uniform mathematical foundation at first. Water area rate, open degree, and morphology coefficient which can depict the change of bays in different respect were taken as quantitative indicators to analyze the morphological changes of Zhelin Bay. The classification based on these indicators was then made in each period of time. Finally, the comprehensive spatio-temporal change of the bay was evaluated in a Changing Index model. Analysis results show that, during the latest 20 years, the water area rate has changed evidently from 0.8503 to 0.7410, leading to the category of Zhelin Bay changed from entire-water bay to much-water bay. Besides, the Changing Index of Zhelin Bay during the latest 20 years is 0.44%. Reasons for the change were discussed and some suggestions were given in the end of the paper.

Taking Urumqi as a case, a simulation of urban population spatial distribution is proposed based on urban land use and population statistical data using GIS, and population spatial distribution patterns are analyzed by the raster population surface. As a result, generating raster population spatial distribution surface is more accurate and natural than the traditional choropleth map of population density in Urumqi. Concerning the population spatial distribution of Urumqi, the population density declines from south to north and the population distribution mainly presents "T-type", the population distribution presents polycentric agglomeration and the population distribution of the districts shows different features. The population density varies significantly with the increase of the distance from CBD. Finally, this paper finds that the development history of districts, terrain and traffic road are main factors influencing Urumqi's population distribution. This paper tries to provide more accurate data of population distribution for the plan and management of urban land, traffic and public facilities in order to enrich the researches of urban population distribution.

Fast-growing plantation planting is especially prevalent in the late 10 years in Southeast China, going with the debate on its positive and negative influence. Mastering the status of non-natural fast-growing plantations is essential for both national and local government's decision-makers. This paper presents the methodology used to detect fast-growing plantation in the extent of Leizhou city in southeast China based on CCD/CBERS time-series images. This methodology is on the basis of the assumption that fast-growing plantation's rotation period is 5 years. NDVI differencing as a change detection method is selected to detect the bald land period, which will be considered to be fast-growing plantation. The result indicates that NDVI differencing method is feasible in extracting fast-growing plantation. The area of fast-growing plantation in Leizhou city is 225.54 square kilometers, distributed all over the city. Plantation scale in west coast and northern part connected with Suixi city is larger than southern part connected with Xuwen city. East coast has the least amount of distribution. The paper proposes that texture and shape analysis will help improving extraction precision.

GIS based Soil and Water Conservation Aided Planning and Design (SWCAPD) is a crucial component for soil and water conservation monitoring and information management system, which provides decision support for small watershed soil and water conservation. GIS affords effective method to manage a large amount of spatial and attribute information about a small watershed, meanwhile, it is significant to discover potential topographical information using GIS spatial analysis. Topographical information includes elevation, slope and aspect and so on, which provides proofs for planning measures. Land use patches layer is regard as the basic cell for planning and design, and the accuracy of patches layer topographical information directly influences the planning result. On the basis of paper relief maps, DEM is obtained after a series of data processing, and it will be clipped by land use patches layer. Finally patch topographical information is acquired and stored. Aided decisions for planning measures are made after combining the acquired topographical information to expert rules and foundation data. The function framework of SWCAPD is given in this paper, and it is implemented aiming to a certain small watershed.

This paper includes three parts. Firstly, it evaluates tourism resources of South Jiangsu based on the "Chinese tourist resources general survey norm". Then it analyzes the quantity and the spatial characteristics of the eminent tourism resources of south Jiangsu based on GIS. The result of comprehensive evaluation and spatial analysis showed that the humanity tourism resources play fundamental roles in the structure of the eminent tourism resources, and the natural tourism resources are important parts; and in the spatial distribution, the tourism resources show the characteristics of "strap" and "circle", and disequilibrium distribution in region. Secondly, it makes use of the graph theory to analyze the spatial structure of the eminent tourist resources and analyzes the topological properties of the tourism resources network using several indexes such as β, γ indexes, accessibility index, average directory length and the shortest path matrix, etc. In the end, the paper pays attention to the spatial structure of tourism resources -city relations. Non-equilibrium index and geographical relation ratio are used to observe the spatial structure between the eminent tourism resources and the five cities in south Jiangsu.

Cartographic visualization represents geographic information with a map form, which enables us retrieve useful geospatial information. In digital environment, cartographic symbol library is the base of cartographic visualization and is an essential component of Geographic Information System as well. Existing cartographic symbol libraries have two flaws. One is the display quality and the other one is relations adjusting. Statistic data presented in this paper indicate that the aliasing problem is a major factor on the symbol display quality on graphic display devices. So, effective graphic anti-aliasing methods based on a new anti-aliasing algorithm are presented and encapsulated in an anti-aliasing graphic library with the form of Component Object Model. Furthermore, cartographic visualization should represent feature relation in the way of correctly adjusting symbol relations besides displaying an individual feature. But current cartographic symbol libraries don't have this capability. This paper creates a cartographic symbol design model to implement symbol relations adjusting. Consequently the cartographic symbol library based on this design model can provide cartographic visualization with relations adjusting capability. The anti-aliasing graphic library and the cartographic symbol library are sampled and the results prove that the two libraries both have better efficiency and effect.

This paper presented an analysis of land use changes of 1995-2005 in Lanzhou, China, and predictions into 2020 with GIS and DUEM model. Urban land use changes of 1995-2005 were analyzed with GIS and three indexes, including Land Use Dynamic Index (LUDI), Land Use Development (LUD) and Land Use Consumption (LUC). DUEM was an extended cellular automata (CA) model developed firstly by Xie in 1994, and refined in 1999. Two scenarios were designed to explore future urban land use changes in Lanzhou: the first was considered as the continuation of the historical trend with the parameters derived from the calibration of DUEM; the second was revised according to urban planning map of 2001-2010 and the fifth five-year plan based on the first. Future urban land use changes were both centralized at the edge of the city under the two different scenarios, mainly in Yantan of Chengguan Distric, Matan and Cuijiadatan of Qilihe District, Anning Country, Shajingyi Country, Cuijizhuan and Yingmentan of Anning District. Future urban land use change under the second scenario was faster than the first, and may be closer to the real future trend. This paper also tested the suitability of DUEM in China.

The main aim of this paper was to identify inland fresh water wetland by using RADARSAT SAR data in combination with optical remote sensing data ETM+. The test area is a part of Hongze Lake, the fourth biggest fresh water lake in China, one of important wetlands for migratory birds in China. In this paper, two scenes of RADARSAT SAR data were acquired, one was obtained (incidence angle 39.1°) on July 9, 2003, another scene of SAR acquired on July 13, 2003(incidence angle 29.8 °). Optical remotely sensed data was Landsat ETM+ acquired on August 21, 2002. In order to explore the potential of Radarsat SAR data in the differentiation of different wetland types and wetland and upland types, two schemes were designed: one scheme was that Landsat ETM+ data and its derived data such as textural metrics were used to the classification of the study area; the other is that the Landsat ETM+ data, derived ancillary data and SAR data were used. CART algorithm was selected for the generation of decision rules, and the rules were applied to the classification of landuse/cover in the whole study area. The results showed that the combination of the SAR data and the optical remotely sensed data have achieved the highest classification accuracy (92.3% of total classification accuracy). The results also confirmed the value of classification tree in the identification of fresh water wetland. It was illustrated that radar data was a good data source for the identification of wetland.

The database of recording the snapshots of land parcels history is the foundation for the most of the models on simulating land use/cover change (LUCC) process. But the sequences of temporal snapshots are not sufficient to deduce and describe the mechanism of LUCC process. The temporal relationship between scenarios of LUCC we recorded could not be transfer into causal relationship categorically, which was regarded as a key factor in spatial-temporal reasoning. The proprietor of land parcels adapted themselves to the policies from governments and the change of production market, and then made decisions in this or that way. The occurrence of each change of a land parcel in an urban area was often related with one or more decision texts when it was investigated on the local scale with high resolution of the background scene. These decision texts may come from different sections of a hierarchical government system on different levels, such as villages or communities, towns or counties, cities, provinces or even the paramount. All these texts were balance results between advantages and disadvantages of different interest groups. They are the essential forces of LUCC in human dimension. Up to now, a methodology is still wanted for on how to express these forces in a simulation system using GIS as a language. The presented paper was part of our initial research on this topic. The term "Event" is a very important concept in the frame of "Object-Oriented" theory in computer science. While in the domain of temporal GIS, the concept of event was developed in another category. The definitions of the event and their transformation relationship were discussed in this paper on three modeling levels as real world level, conceptual level and programming level. In this context, with a case study of LUCC in recent 30 years in Xiamen city of Fujian province, P. R. China, the paper focused on how to extract information of events and rules from the policy files collected and integrate the information into the LUCC temporal database. The paper concluded by listing the main steps of how to extract events and rules from files and build an event database, and indicating directions for future work about how to develop a spatial-temporal reasoning system on the event-oriented LUCC database.

The mutual conversion between analog map and digital map is two main contents of the study on digital mapping, which is the production of paper map and spatial data. The visualization of spatial data is the common problem that the spatial data application system confronted, so it is practically meaningful to study the mutual conversion between analog map and digital map. The paper indicates the two processes of the decrease and increase of cartographic information content in two conversions, educes a cartographic information transfer model based on Shannon communication system model, and makes a deep quantitative and qualitative analysis on the decrease and increase of cartographic information in analog/digital conversion in terms of information theory and cartographic theory. The paper also shows that the accuracy of cartographic information should be improved in analog-digital conversion and the information content transformed should be increased to the fullest extent in digital-analog conversion. The corresponding disposal is respectively given for the two processes.

Integration of spatial information technology for digital urban planning (DUP) was studied in this paper based on analyzing the challenges of digital city upon current urban planning as well as its developing trend. Three subjects related to the spatial information technology and integration were discussed in this paper. First of all, the technology methodology system of digital urban planning was built up, and the position and functions of spatial information technology in digital urban planning were defined. Secondly, the technical integratation approaches of spatial information technology for digital urban planning was discussed in three levels, which include data level, function level, and platform level. Thirdly, the integrated application approaches of spatial information technology for digital urban planning were suggested according to the characteristics of master urban planning and detailed urban planning, which include three steps, such as DUP data preparation, DUP scheme creation, and DUP scheme submission.

It is important to make decisions on how to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) to China and know how the inequality of FDI introduction by locational different provinces. Following background descriptions on China’s FDI economic environments and FDI-related policies, this paper demonstrates the uses of geographical information system (GIS) and multi-criterion decision-making (MCDM) framework in solving a spatial multi-objective problem of evaluating and ranking China's provinces for FDI introduction. It implements a foreign direct investment decision support system, which reveals the main determinants of FDI in China and gives some results of regional geographical analysis over spatial data. Keywords: Foreign direct investment; Geographical information systems; Multi-criterion decision-making 1. INTRODUCTION Until late September 2004, there have been nearly 500,000 foreign investors with the total investment of USD 550.2 billion in People’s Republic of China from 192 countries and regions, who work in many sectors like manufacturing, service trade, agriculture, infrastructure, etc. Foreign direct investment (FDI) has driven the formation of Chinese open economy and accelerated its development. Especially these recent years, as a main power in Chinese economic development, foreign investment functions more and more strongly. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have gained popularity in recent years. GIS software is unique in its ability to capture, store, and manage spatially referenced data such as points, lines, and polygons (vector data model), or as continuous fields (raster data model). Application of GIS to economy decision-making systems is emerging rapidly as the quest for revealing the main determinants of FDI in China over well-known spatial phenomenon intensifies. This paper proposes a methodology, researches and implements a foreign direct investment decision support system (FDIDSS), which combines geographical information system (GIS) and a multi-criterion decision-making framework (MCDM) to reveal the determinants of introducing FDI in different provinces or regions. FDIDSS is developed for the Foreign Investment department of Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section two presents the background information of FDI, decision-making and the related work; section three presents the methodological framework and how to apply GIS technology in FDIDSS; section four gives results of FDIDSS and presents the empirical findings. Finally, section five demonstrates the future work. In discussing the methodology, a brief description of the steps for the multiple criteria decision-making framework is provided, and the model as utilized in this study.

The study on landscape pattern is an important field of urban land use and ecological change. Since 1990s, the widely accepted Patch-Corridor-Matrix model is generally used in qualitative description of landscape pattern. In recent years, quantitative evaluation on urban landscape dynamics is becoming hot in research. By making a critical review on existing research methods of landscape pattern, a new approach based on RS/GIS is put forward in this paper, comprising three steps, "General pattern characteristics - Gradient differentiation feature- Directional signature of the landscape", and we call it GGD. This method is applied to the case study of Xi'an metropolitan area in China. The result shows that the method is effective on quantitative study of urban landscape. The preparation of the method GGD is setting up research platform based on RS and GIS. By using the software of Geographical Information System (Arcgis9.0 & Erdas), the authors got the interpretation of remote sensing images of different years, and carried on the division of the landscape type of the research region. By calculating various index of landscape level with software Fragstats3.3 as an assistant tool and adopting three steps of GGD combined with landscape index, this paper can assesses the landscape spatial pattern of urban area: 1) General pattern characteristics analysis is to get transition probability of various landscape through Markov chain and to predict the landscape transformation by introducing CA model. The analysis emphasizes on total landscape structure and its change over time; 2) Gradient characteristic analysis, which makes gradient zone by taking city as a center outwardly with certain distance and contrastively analyzes the landscape index of each subarea, stresses the spatial character of landscape pattern, verifies urban morphology theories and provides the quantitative warranty for establishment of urban modality. Therefore, the analysis is useful for supervising urban expanding speed; 3)Direction characteristic analysis, which is setting up radiate strip on west-east, south-north, southwest-northeast and northwest-southeast and form certain width on each direction, can precisely and quantitatively indicate different characteristic of urban landscape at each development direction, and by combined with gradient analysis it is highly advantageous to the examination and planning of urban expanding direction. In the case study on Xi'an metropolitan area, remote sensing images of 1988 and 2005 Landsat-TM were handled, and the division of the landscape type of the region was also carried on. According to the above approach, the result was got and some valuable information was showed as follows: 1) The diversity of overall landscape of Xi'an metropolitan area tends to increase and the degree of fragmentation tends to deepen. With the increase of urbanization level, the visual component of landscape is more and more diversified, the shapes of landscape is more and more complicated and ecologically more and more fragmented. In the region where urbanization level is low, natural landscape is the main component of the landscape, the diversity of the landscape is low. And because landscape is seriously disturbed by human activities with urbanization, fragmentation of the landscape emerges periodically. 2) In the process of transect gradient analysis, the landscape pattern index can explore the urbanization gradient, and its trend to reduce gradually towards the suburban. The landscape of area with a high urbanization level is mainly man-created, and its patches show large number, small area, simple shape and higher landscape heterogeneity. The transect gradient analysis on different time series indicates the relationship between urbanization level and landscape pattern. The landscape of urban area suffers intensely from human being, and its pattern component and spatial collocation depends on the interference intensity to a large degree. In the area with a high urbanization level, its pattern component is more man-created and less natural landscape. The landscape collocation characteristic of its patches takes on a large number, little average area, simple shape and low polymerization degree. 3) Analysis of direction and gradient of Xi'an metropolitan area can quantitatively reflect influence of urbanization and characteristics of urban landscape in the main development axes of north-south and east. Result shows that the degree of internal integration between Xi'an city and Xianyang city is gradually enhanced with the quickly urbanization course in China.

Traditionally, the performance of an imagery intelligence collection system is quantified by a satisfaction percentage. The mission satisfaction is the number of images collected divided by the number of images requested. This paradigm assumes the information needed is generated from the collected imagery data if the data is delivered on time to the consumer. As persistent surveillance requirements become more prominent, the time sequence of data collection is increasingly important. The satisfaction percentage is not wholly descriptive of a collection system's ability to complete persistent surveillance missions. A metric of imagery data utility that is dependent on the time sequence of data collected is necessary. Booz Allen Hamilton's transformational mission analysis focuses on additional metrics to characterize satisfaction of persistent surveillance requirements. Surveillance missions are based on a need to monitor an activity or event. The observables are animate, and may require a time sequence of images. For surveillance imagery data to be useful, the system must collect the data in required sequence and deliver the information in a timely fashion. Booz Allen defines a utility score to quantify system performance against persistent surveillance missions. The utility score includes the satisfaction percentage, but is sensitive to the time dependences of data. This paper outlines a transformational approach to mission analysis. The paper introduces examples of surveillance missions, and the limited value of satisfaction percentage. It defines data relationships between imagery system capabilities and surveillance missions. Finally, it computes the utility score, and quantifies the performance of an example collection system.

This paper discusses the drivers and observables of geographic dynamics as well as GIS approaches to facilitate geographic dynamics understanding. Geographic domains exhibit diverse dynamics across multiple spatiotemporal scales. Such diverse and complex geographic dynamics poses challenges to connect relevant information and infer the underlined mechanisms. Central to the paper is the premise that activities, events and processes are drivers of geographic dynamics, and these drivers give rise to changes and movements in geographic space. The changes and movements become observables from which we can measure and assess the properties of geographic dynamics. GIS frameworks provide opportunities to integrate spatial and temporal data to examine the drivers and observables of geographic dynamics. The paper will highlight key GIS visualization, analysis, and modeling techniques for geographic dynamics understanding.

Advanced Land Observing Satellite(ALOS) was successfuly launched on January 24th 2006 at Tanegashima Space Center by H-IIA rocket. The Satellite mass is about 4 tons of weight, Sun synchronous sub-recurrent orbit, repetation cycle is 46 days (sub cycle 2days) and 5 years mission operation. ALOS has four missions such as Cartography, Regional Observation, Resource Survey and Diasater monitoring. After the satelllite launch, there were several opportunities to observe natural disasters in the world.. ALOS will be distribute disaster information through international framework such as Sentinel Asia and International Charter on Disaster Monitoring. The 'Sentinel Asia' initiative was established by space agencies and disaster authorities in the Asia and Oceania, to use Remote Sensing information and Web-GIS data-delivery technologies in support of disaster management in the Asia-Pacific region. Sentinel Asia is 'voluntary and best-efforts-basis initiatives' led by the Asia-Pacific Regional Space Agency Forum (APRSAF) to share the disaster information in the region using the 'Digital Asia' (Web-GIS) platform. International Charter is the membership framework to operate the satellite in case of disaster occurs. and distribute the data and information free of charge. ALOS is nominated both activities to contribute disaster monitoring and mitigation. This paper describes the introduction of ALOS and acquired disaster images to indicate its potential use for disaster monitoring. The design of follow on mission is indispensable to promise continuous monitoring of natural disaster. This paper also describes the initial idea of ALOS follow on mission.

This paper uses the McArthur forest fire spread model, takes Visual C++ and OpenGL(Open Graphics Library) development kit, and experiments on the region of the Zhejiang Province Linan by using this city 1: 50000 DEM(Digital Elevation Model) data, investigations data of forest resources, unifies the real-time meteorological data, and researches the method of forest-fire spread simulation based on the 3D(three-dimension), which studies Forest fire production and the spread simulator method with its related algorithm in emphasis. The paper takes the forest fire production and spread method as the foundation to propose and design six algorithms to successively simulate the forest fire spread. Respectively: The fire that spreads in different directions algorithm, distributed fire points algorithm, scene of a fire region computation algorithm, mapping fire particle algorithm, flame production algorithm, and billboard technology application algorithm.

Aimed at the background of development of digital urban planning, the paper analyzed the demand of sharing digital urban planning information. It was pointed out that sharing digital urban panning information is the necessity of information society development. The technical characteristics and application models of WebGIS were analyzed according to the trends of information technology development. The system structure and function components of the application system for sharing digital urban planning information were discussed and designed based on WebGIS environment. Taking information sharing for general urban planning of Beijing as an example, the WebGIS application system for sharing digital urban planning information was studied and developed. Two results were summarized in the end of the paper.

This paper concerns the study of visual impact assessment of routes on landscape by using remote sensing imagery. Basic indicators are created which can be useful for the analysis of route characteristics from the Landsat TM and Spot P fusion. The area which is the object of study is the Ancares Wildlife Reserve (Lugo, Spain). This paper focuses on the digital processing of rural roads to create indicators to determine if the road fits the landscape. Traditional methods are substituted by the application of satellite image processing through the application of linear enhancing, directional filtering, masking, supervised and unsupervised classifications and operations between images. A procedure has been developed which permits to map qualitative classes of visual integration of routes on landscape from the association of three variables: route linearity, vegetation in the roadside and visibility of the route. Fieldwork has allowed verification of the ground-truth between the physical reality of the area and the obtained thematic mapping. The information provided by the map will determine which routes require to take measures to reduce its visual impact on landscape.

RS/GIS/GPS is a series of efficient techniques for acquiring, managing and analyzing geographic information. This paper describes the using of these techniques in the Entironment investigation of Minjiang Upriver, based on national 863 projects 308 mission Xibujinjinxingdong sub-mission. With the help of forestry, water resource and agrology techniques, a main routine of work flow are introduced. It mainly comprises seven steps: (1) Collect related data, thematic maps, such as Land Use Maps and Forest Maps, were gathered; (2) Select the raw remote sensing images with thinking of the vegetation properties and the scale of target map. A red, green and blue (RGB) colors composite of Landsat TM’s band 432 is selected as the information sources;(3) Process and interpret the remote sensing images with ortho-image technique and interactive working method. As a result, 46 digital maps of 1:100,000 scale was produced;(4) perform field work or inspect on the spot with the help of GPS. More than 2000 kilometers routine and 294 patches was validated,;(5) Second time Interpretation;(6) Design and create the geodatabase. Not less than 20 layers was designed to contain necessary geo-information; and (7) Acquire, edit and store spatial data with the help of GIS software. After all these works, some spatial analysis is made. It clearly reveals large changes between 1990 and 2000: Nature forest area has decreased about 65000 ha; Manually planted forest has increased about 60000 ha; Grassland and plow land have been decreasing in various level; Arid valley has the tendency to enlarge. According to some forestry study, main reason such as over felling the forest, tillage on steep mountain slopes in upper river and government behavior is discussed to interpret these large changes in the end of this paper.

With rapid development of GIS techniques, GIS techniques have come into applied period in the field of natural science and other application fields. Because of complex marine structure with many dynamic changes, tight relationship among factors in body of water, fuzzy boundary and unintuitive structure character, it is especially difficult to apply GIS to the field of ocean science. Beginning with the ocean current GIS analysis, this paper tries to develop GIS application study of oceanography. It is evident that the first problem needing to be solved is GIS expression of current field. Therefore, main information types of ocean current data that many physical oceanography scientists are using are collected. Firstly, five expression of current field commonly used in physical oceanography are: section vector expression of average current speed, component expression of current field in large area, time series expression of fixed point and expression of current path. The main work of this paper is to give corresponding GIS expression respectively according to the above expressions of ocean current. Based on the above work, corresponding GIS operational cases are given to further prove the feasibility of GIS expressions of current field. Finally, the conclusions and further work are suggested.

Velocity Magnetic Resonance (MR) images are a novel form of medical images. A special gradient-modulation technique is utilized to capture motion velocity of tissue and blood. As well as the tissue density image, there are also other images that depict the velocity components along axes defined relative to the plane of imaging. The images are of the cardiac region and are aligned with the short-axis of the left ventricle. We present the results of clustering cardiac image sequences using the Fuzzy c-Means (FCM) algorithm. Our paper demonstrates how the application of clustering to one frame in the cine sequence of images can be utilized in order to track reasonably well the contraction and relaxation of the Left Ventricle. Our paper shows that this imaging technique is generally accurate and certainly adds to the information already contained in the tissue density images.

Coastal saltmarsh and their constituent components and processes are of an interest scientifically due to their ecological function and services. However, heterogeneity and seasonal dynamic of the coastal wetland system makes it challenging to map saltmarshes with remotely sensed data. This study selected four important saltmarsh species Pragmitis australis, Sporobolus virginicus, Ficiona nodosa and Schoeloplectus sp. as well as a Mangrove and Pine tree species, Avecinia and Casuarina sp respectively. High Spatial Resolution Worldview-2 data and Coarse Spatial resolution Landsat 8 imagery were selected in this study. Among the selected vegetation types some patches ware fragmented and close to the spatial resolution of Worldview-2 data while and some patch were larger than the 30 meter resolution of Landsat 8 data. This study aims to test the effectiveness of different classifier for the imagery with various spatial and spectral resolutions. Three different classification algorithm, Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) were tested and compared with their mapping accuracy of the results derived from both satellite imagery. For Worldview-2 data SVM was giving the higher overall accuracy (92.12%, kappa =0.90) followed by ANN (90.82%, Kappa 0.89) and MLC (90.55%, kappa = 0.88). For Landsat 8 data, MLC (82.04%) showed the highest classification accuracy comparing to SVM (77.31%) and ANN (75.23%). The producer accuracy of the classification results were also presented in the paper.

Herdade da Contenda (HC), located in Moura municipality, Beja district (Alentejo province) in the south of Portugal (southwestern Iberia Peninsula), is a national hunting area with 5270ha. The development of an integrated system that aims to make the management of the natural and cultural heritage resources will be very useful for an effective management of this area. This integrated system should include the physical characterization of the territory, naturalcon servation, land use and land management themes, as well the cultural heritage resources . This paper presents a new tool for an integrated environmental management system of the HC, which aims to produce maps under a GIS open source environment (QGIS). The application is composed by a single button which opens a window. The window is composed by twelve menus (File, DRASTIC, Forest Fire Risk, Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) ,Bioclimatic Index, Cultural Heritage, Fauna and Flora, Ortofoto, Normalizes Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Digital Elevation Model (DEM), Land Use Land Cover Cover (LULC) and Help. Several inputs are requires to generate these maps, e.g. DEM, geologic information, soil map, hydraulic conductivity information, LULC map, vulnerability and economic information, NDVI. Six buttons were added to the toolbar which allows to manipulate the information in th emap canvas: Zoom in, Zoom out, Pan, Print/Layout and Clear. This integrated and open source GIS environment management system was developed for the HC area, but could be easily adapted to other natural or protected area.Desp ite the lack of data, the methodology presented fulfills the objectives. Keywords: QGIS, Environment management, protected/nature areas, DRASTIC, RUSLE, Forest fire, Cultural heritage

Landsat is a joint USGS and NASA space program for Earth Observation ( EO ), which represents the world’s longest running system of satellites for moderate-resolution. The European Space Agency ( ESA ) has acquired Landsat data over Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East during the last 40 years. A new ESA Landsat Multi-Spectral Scanner ( MSS ), Thematic Mapper ( TM ) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus ( ETM+ ) processor has been developed. This enhanced processor aligns historical Landsat products to the highest quality standards that can be achieved with the current knowledge of the instruments. The updated processor is mainly based on the USGS algorithm; however it has some different features that are detailed in this paper. Current achievements include the processing and availability of approximately 860,000 new TM/ETM+ high-quality products between 1983 and 2011 from the Kiruna (S), Maspalomas (E) and Matera (I) archives; Matera includes data from the Fucino (I), Neustrelitz (D), O’Higgins (Antarctica), Malindi (Kenya), Libreville (Gabon) and Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) ground stations. The products are freely available for immediate download to the users through a very fast and simple dissemination service (at: https://landsat-ds.eo.esa.int/app/) and through ESA’s browsing system, EOLI. The remaining MSS data, dating back more than 40 years, will gradually become available during 2015 and 2016. The ESA Landsat processor algorithm enhancement, together with the results of the ESA archive bulk-processing data regarding production, quality control and data validation are herein presented.

The paper presents accuracy comparison of sub-pixel classification based on medium resolution Landsat data and high resolution RapidEye satellite images, performed using machine learning algorithms built on decision and regression trees method (C.5.0 and Cubist). The research was conducted in southern Poland for the catchment of the Dobczyce Reservoir. The aim of the study was to obtain image of percentage impervious surface coverage and assess which data sets can be more applicable for the purpose of impervious surface coverage estimation. Imperviousness index map generation was a two-stage procedure. The first step was classification, which divided the study area into two categories: a) completely permeable (imperviousness index less than 1%) and b) fully or partially impervious areas. For pixels classified as impervious, the percentage of impervious surface coverage within a single pixel was estimated. Decision and regression trees models construction was done based on training data set derived from Landsat TM pixels as well as for fragments of RapidEye images corresponding to the same Landsat TM training pixels. In order to obtain imperviousness index maps with the minimum possible error we did the estimation of models accuracy based on the results of cross-validation. The approaches guaranteeing the lowest means errors in terms of training set using C5.0 and Cubist algorithm for Landsat and RapidEye images were selected. Accuracy of the final imperviousness index maps was checked based on validation data sets. The root mean square error of determination of the percentage of the impervious surfaces within a single Landsat pixel was 9.9% for C.5.0/Cubist method. However, the root mean square error specified for RapidEye test data was 7.2%. The study has shown that better results of two-stage imperiousness index map estimation using RapidEye satellite images can be obtained.

In our paper we would like to present a remote sensing perspective on damage assessment of a hill-fort from central Poland, which is a listed site. The lime stone from this hill is known for its quality and has been excavated from at least medieval time. Due to poorly performed walking prospections the extent of the site has been faultily drawn and the whole extent of the site has been detected. Although most of it is being protected by and natural-archaeological reserve, some part are still being quarried. The goal of our study was to assess the damage done to the landscape of the Chelmo Mount. In our research we will investigate two types of data: very high resolution satellite imagery and LiDAR data (and its derivatives). Supervised classification and thematic change detection applied on archival satellite imagery enabled us to evaluate the progression of quarry in time. The DTM derived from LiDAR data, brought us the possibility to mark the potential outline of the site and the area to be protected as well as a 3D insight in to the damage done to the landscape itself.

In Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan, the O-type foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) appeared and spread from March to July, 2010. The first infected livestock by FMD virus was detected on March 26, 2010 at Tsuno Town in Miyazaki Prefecture. The O-type FMD was found on March 14 at the suburb of Lanzhou City in Gansu, and on March 25, 2010 in Shanxi, China. The duration of FMD virus incubation is 2 to 8 days. Maki et al. (2011, 2012) presumed the cause of the first FMD in Miyazaki as follows: The yellow sand adhered with FMD virus was transported from Gansu to Miyazaki by global westerly winds. In this paper, we investigate whether the yellow sand generated in Gansu flew to Miyazaki in March, 2010 by using MODIS data of Terra and Aqua satellites. True-color mosaic images, AVI mosaic images and T11 mosaic images from China to Japan are made and examined. The aerosol vapor index (AVI) is defined as AVI=T12-T11, where T12 and T11 are the brightness temperatures at 12μm and 11μm wavelength, respectively. The AVI can detect the dust and sandstorms (DSS, i.e., yellow sands) in satellite images both at daytime and night. AVI values are classified into six levels from 0 to 5. From AVI images, DSS existed in the vicinity of Lanzhou on March 19, and in the south area of Shanxi on March 20, and in the vicinity of Tsuno Town on March 21. If Maki et al. are right, the cause of the first FMD in Miyazaki in March 2010 is that DSS generated in Gansu on March 19 flew to Miyazaki on March 21.

The detection of impervious surfaces is an important issue in the study of urban and rural environments. Imperviousness refers to water’s inability to pass through a surface. Although impervious surfaces represent a small percentage of the Earth’s surface, knowledge of their locations is relevant to planning and managing human activities. Impervious structures are primarily manmade (e.g., roads and rooftops). Impervious surfaces are an environmental concern because many processes that modify the normal function of land, air, and water resources are initiated during their construction. This paper presents a novel method of identifying impervious surfaces using satellite images and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) data. The inputs for the procedure are SPOT images formed by four spectral bands (corresponding to red, green, near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths), a digital terrain model, and an .las file. The proposed method computes five decision indexes from the input data to classify the studied area into two categories: impervious (subdivided into buildings and roads) and non-impervious surfaces. The impervious class is divided into two subclasses because the elements forming this category (mainly roads and rooftops) have different spectral and height properties, and it is difficult to combine these elements into one group. The classification is conducted using a decision tree procedure. For every decision index, a threshold is set for which every surface is considered impervious or non-impervious. The proposed method has been applied to four different regions located in the north, center, and south of Spain, providing satisfactory results for every dataset.

For the purposes of a research project, for the compilation of the archaeological and environmental digital map of the island of Antiparos, the production of updated large scale orthophotos was required. Hence suitable stereoscopic high resolution satellite imagery was acquired. Two Geoeye-1 stereopairs were enough to cover this small island of the Cyclades complex in the central Aegean. For the orientation of the two stereopairs numerous ground control points were determined using GPS observations. Some of them would also serve as check points. The images were processed using commercial stereophotogrammetric software suitable to process satellite stereoscopic imagery. The results of the orientations are evaluated and the digital terrain model was produced using automated and manual procedures. The DTM was checked both internally and externally with comparison to other available DTMs. In this paper the procedures for producing the desired orthophotography are critically presented and the final result is compared and evaluated for its accuracy, completeness and efficiency. The final product is also compared against the orthophotography produced by Ktimatologio S.A. using aerial images in 2007. The orthophotography produced has been evaluated metrically using the available check points, while qualitative evaluation has also been performed. The results are presented and a critical approach for the usability of satellite imagery for the production of large scale orthophotos is attempted.