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The Gorganrood watershed (GW) is experiencing considerable environmental change in the form of natural hazards and erosion, as well as deforestation, cultivation and development activities. As a result of this, different types of Land Cover/Land Use (LCLU) change are taking place on an intensive level in the area. This research study investigates the LCLU conditions upstream of this watershed for the years 1972, 1986, 2000 and 2014, using Landsat MSS, TM, ETM+ and OLI/TIRS images. LCLU maps for 1972, 1986, and 2000 were produced using pixel-based classification methods. For the 2014 LCLU map, Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) in combination with the data-mining capabilities of Gini and J48 machine-learning algorithms were used. The accuracy of the maps was assessed using overall accuracy, quantity disagreement and allocation disagreement indexes. The overall accuracy ranged from 89% to 95%, quantity disagreement from 2.1% to 6.6%, and allocation disagreement from 2.1% for 2014 to 2.7% for 2000. The results of this study indicate that a significant amount of change has occurred in the region, and that this has as a consequence affected ecosystem services and human activity. This knowledge of the LCLU status in the area will help managers and decision makers to develop plans and programs aimed at effectively managing the watershed into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vines and olives are two important and widespread traditional agricultural crops that are also connected to the Judeo–Christian–Muslim tradition. The goal of the research was to demonstrate the importance of using cartographical sources to obtain a more accurate and complete view of the past. To this end, the aims were: (1) to reconstruct the former agricultural land-use in three periods, 1873–1874, 1917, and 1943–1945; (2) to analyze the different spatial physical factors that could explain the spatial distribution of traditional agricultural landscapes; (3) to identify the changes which took place between the three reconstructed timestamps. The research employed different cartographic sources and the implemented analyses were conducted using GIS tools and methods. The results show that, in the past, the distribution of vines and olive groves greatly depended on several physical geographic factors (climate, slopes, direction). Nonetheless, human factors such as political instability, cultural and religious beliefs contributed as well. Moreover, this research showed how GIS has advanced historical geography research. Lastly, the research demonstrated that obtaining the most complete view of the past can be achieved by a combination of sources together with the use of GIS tools and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aquaculture production in Tanzania has increased in recent years, responding to an increased demand for fish, but the scale and productivity of smallholder aquaculture remains below the level needed to support significant sector growth in Tanzania. This study assesses, through geospatial analyses, the suitability for freshwater pond farming of Oreochromis niloticus and Clarias gariepinus in Tanzania, by assessing the geographical distribution of seven criteria (water availability, water temperature, soil texture, terrain slope, availability of farm inputs, potential farm-gate sales, and access to local markets) identified as important for fish pond farming. The criteria were developed and standardized from 15 sub-criteria, which were classified into a four-level suitability scale based on physical scores. The individual weights of the different criteria in the overall GIS suitability assessment were determined through a multi-criteria evaluation. The final results were validated and compared through field observations, interviews with 89 rural and 11 urban aquaculture farmers, and a questionnaire survey with 16 regional fisheries officers. Our results indicate that there is a good potential for aquaculture in Tanzania. Almost 60% of Tanzania is assessed as being suitable and 40% as moderately suitable for small-scale subsistence pond farming, which is the dominating fish farming practice currently. The corresponding figures for medium-scale commercial farming, which many regions expect to be the dominating farming method within ten-years, were 52% and 47% respectively. The availability of water was the most limiting factor for fish pond farming, which was confirmed by both farmers and regional fisheries officers, and assessed as being "suitable" in only 28% of the country. The availability of farm-gate sales and local markets were "moderate suitable" to "suitable" and were seen as a constraint for commercial farms in rural areas. The availability of farm inputs (agriculture waste and manure) was overall good (26% very suitable and 32% suitable), but high-quality fish feed was seen as a constraint to aquaculture development, both by farmers and regional fisheries officers. Soil, terrain, and water temperature conditions were assessed as good, especially at low altitudes and in regions close to the sea and south of Lake Victoria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) is a growth management policy that designates specific areas where growth should be concentrated in order to avoid urban sprawl. The objective of such a boundary is to protect agricultural land, open spaces and the natural environment, as well as to use existing infrastructure and public services more efficiently. Due to the inherent heterogeneity and complexity of settlements, UGBs in Germany are currently created manually by experts. Therefore, every dataset is linked to a specific area, investigation period and dedicated use. Clearly, up-to-date, homogeneous, meaningful and cost-efficient delineations created automatically are needed to avoid this reliance on manually or semi-automatically generated delineations. Here, we present an aggregative method to produce UGBs using building footprints and generally available topographic data as inputs. It was applied to study areas in Frankfurt/Main, the Hanover region and rural Brandenburg while taking full account of Germany's planning and legal framework for spatial development. Our method is able to compensate for most of the weaknesses of available UGB data and to significantly raise the accuracy of UGBs in Germany. Therefore, it represents a valuable tool for generating basic data for future studies. Application elsewhere is also conceivable by regionalising the employed parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With rapid population growth, there is an increasing demand for vertical use of space. The wide spread of complex and high-rise buildings, as well as the increasing number of infrastructure above or underground, requires new methods for efficient management of land property. 3D cadastre has, thus, become a necessity for land administration. However, the success of 3D cadastral systems relies on the definition of legal and institutional frameworks and requires implementing performant technical solutions. The potential of BIM and 3D GIS in this field has been demonstrated by several authors. However, cadastral development is strongly related to the national context of each country in terms of laws, institutions, etc. In this paper, an integrated approach based on BIM and 3D GIS for the implementation of a 3D cadastre in Morocco is presented. This approach demonstrates the relevance of such integration for the efficient management of cadastral information. First, a Conceptual Data Model (CDM) based on an extension of CityGML, was proposed for the management of cadastral information in Morocco. Then, a BIM modeling process was developed according to the model's specifications and then translated to CityGML format. After that, a 3D Geodatabase was implemented in ArcGIS based on the proposed CDM. Our method was applied to a case of co-ownership building, showing several difficulties and limits in terms of 2D representation. The results show several advantages in terms of representation and management of 3D cadastral objects. In addition, some improvements are proposed to extend the concept of co-owner share to a volumetric calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islands as peripheral and ultra-peripheral are typically highlighted as ecologically sensitive areas to human activities due to the tremendous biological diversity of beings and the future possibility of habitat loss. In this regard, the comprehension of the land occupation dynamics and trends in the ultra-peripheral territories is crucial to attempt long-lasting regional sustainability, as is the island region's case. Therefore, the present article aims to analyze the trends and dynamics of the land-use changes on the European Archipelagos of the Macaronesia Region over the last three decades, using the CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment) data. Some of the obtained results show that about 3.4% of the Azores' surface is characterized mainly by discontinuous urban fabric, representing 67% of the total urban fabric of the Azores over the last thirty years. Additionally, in Madeira Archipelago, the land is mainly occupied by forest and semi-natural areas, representing almost three-thirds of the territory. A similar scenario is verified in the Canary Islands, where forests and semi-natural areas represent approximately three-quarters of the territory. Once more, this study shows the relevance of the island areas' unique character, which should be preserved and protected. Therefore, the priorities must be defined and established management strategies that are significant for the well-being of these highly valued areas. Moreover, the study showed that notable changes had occurred in the period 1990–2018 in this landscape. Hence there is a need for appropriate measures to mitigate these negative impacts on the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black soil is fertile, abundant with organic matter (OM) and is exceptional for farming. The black soil zone in northeast China is the third-largest black soil zone globally and produces a quarter of China's commodity grain. However, the soil organic matter (SOM) in this zone is declining, and the quality of cultivated land is falling off rapidly due to overexploitation and unsustainable management practices. To help develop an integrated protection strategy for black soil, this study aimed to identify the primary factors contributing to SOM degradation. The geographic detector, which can detect both linear and nonlinear relationships and the interactions based on spatial heterogeneous patterns, was used to quantitatively analyze the natural and anthropogenic factors affecting SOM concentration in northeast China. In descending order, the nine factors affecting SOM are temperature, gross domestic product (GDP), elevation, population, soil type, precipitation, soil erosion, land use, and geomorphology. The influence of all factors is significant, and the interaction of any two factors enhances their impact. The SOM concentration decreases with increased temperature, population, soil erosion, elevation and terrain undulation. SOM rises with increased precipitation, initially decreases with increasing GDP but then increases, and varies by soil type and land use. Conclusions about detailed impacts are presented in this paper. For example, wind erosion has a more significant effect than water erosion, and irrigated land has a lower SOM content than dry land. Based on the study results, protection measures, including conservation tillage, farmland shelterbelts, cross-slope ridges, terraces, and rainfed farming are recommended. The conversion of high-quality farmland to non-farm uses should be prohibited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public bike-sharing is eco-friendly, connects excellently with other transportation modes, and provides a means of mobility that is highly suitable in the current era of climate change. This study proposes a methodology for inferring the bike trip purpose based on bike-share and point-of-interest (POI) data. Because the purpose of a trip involves decision-making, its inference necessitates an understanding of the spatiotemporal complexity of human activities. Thus, the spatiotemporal features affecting bike trips were selected from the bike-share data, and the land uses at the origin and destination of the trips were extracted from the POI data. During POI type embedding, the data were augmented considering the geographical distance between the POIs and the number of bike rentals at each bike station. We further developed a ground truth data construction method that uses temporal mobile and POI data. The inference model was built using machine learning and applied to experiments involving bike stations in Seocho-gu, Seoul, Korea. The experimental results revealed that optimal performance was achieved with the use of decision tree algorithms, as demonstrated by a 78.95% overall accuracy and 66.43% F1-score. The proposed method contributes to a better understanding of the causes of movement within cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Road networks are the main source of mortality for many species. Amphibians, which are in global decline, are the most road-killed fauna group, due to their activity patterns and preferred habitats. Many different methodologies have been applied in modeling the relationship between environment and road-kills events, such as logistic regression. Here, we compared the performance of five regression techniques to relate amphibians' road-kill frequency to environmental variables. For this, we surveyed three country roads in northern Portugal in search of road-killed amphibians. To explain the presence of road-kills, we selected a set of environmental variables important for the presence of amphibians and the occurrence of road-kills. We compared the performances of five modeling techniques: (i) generalized linear models, (ii) generalized additive models, (iii) random forest, (iv) boosted regression trees, and (v) geographically weighted regression. The boosted regression trees and geographically weighted regression techniques performed the best, with a percentage of deviance explained between 61.8% and 76.6% and between 55.3% and 66.7%, respectively. Moreover, the geographically weighted regression showed a great advantage over the other techniques, as it allows mapping local parameter coefficients as well as local model performance (pseudo-R2). The results suggest that geographically weighted regression is a useful tool for road-kill modeling, as well as to better visualize and map the spatial variability of the models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standardized delimiting of local climate zones (LCZ) will be better applicable to the urban adaptation to climate change when the ecohydrological properties of LCZ units are known. Therefore, the properties of LCZ units based on the methodology of ecohydrological zoning of the urban landscape, which was created in GIS as a basis for planning blue-green infrastructure of cities in the Czech Republic, are presented in the paper. The goal of this study is to compare approaches and results of our own ecohydrological zonation and standardized LCZ delimiting in the city of Pilsen. Both methodological approaches differ in input data, resolution details and parameters used. The results showed that the areas of the individual LCZ classes show different levels of ecohydrological qualities. Internal heterogeneity of LCZ classes demonstrated by variance of ecohydrological parameters' values can be partly explained by different techniques and data sources for delimitation of both zonations, but by different sets of delimitation criteria. The discussion is held on the importance of terrain slope for supplementing the LCZ classification. A case study can be a stimulus for further development of holistic urban zoning methodologies that would take into account both climatological and ecohydrological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been growing interest in urban geomorphology both for its applications in terms of landscape planning, and its historical, cultural, and scientific interest. Due to recent urban growth, the identification of landforms in cities is difficult, particularly in Mediterranean and central European cities, characterized by more than 1000 years of urban stratification. By comparing and overlapping 19th-century cartography and modern topography from remote sensing data, this research aims to assess the morphological evolution of the city of Genoa (Liguria, NW Italy). The analysis focuses on a highly detailed 1:2'000 scale map produced by Eng. Ignazio Porro in the mid-19th century. The methodology, developed in QGIS, was applied on five case studies of both hillside and valley floor areas of the city of Genoa. Through map overlay and digitalization of elevation data and contour lines, it was possible to identify with great accuracy the most significant morphological transformations that have occurred in the city since the mid-19th century. In addition, the results were validated by direct observation and by drills data of the regional database. The results allowed the identification and quantification of the main anthropic landforms. The paper suggests that the same methodology can be applied to other historical urban contexts characterized by urban and architectural stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indoor evacuation efficiency heavily relies on the connectivity status of navigation networks. During disastrous situations, the spreading of hazards (e.g., fires, plumes) significantly influences indoor navigation networks' status. Nevertheless, current research concentrates on utilizing classical statistical methods to analyze this status and lacks the flexibility to evaluate the increasingly disastrous scope's influence. We propose an evaluation method combining 3D spatial geometric distance and topology for emergency evacuations to address this issue. Within this method, we offer a set of indices to describe the nodes' status and the entire network under emergencies. These indices can help emergency responders quickly identify vulnerable nodes and areas in the network, facilitating the generation of evacuation plans and improving evacuation efficiency. We apply this method to analyze the fire evacuation efficiency and resilience of two experiment buildings' indoor networks. Experimental results show a strong influence on the network's spatial connectivity on the evacuation efficiency under disaster situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land-use change is a typical geographic evolutionary process characterized by spatial heterogeneity. As such, the driving factors, conversion rules, and rate of change vary for different regions around the world. However, most cellular automata (CA) models use the same transition rules for all cells in the model space when simulating land-use change. Thus, spatial heterogeneity change is ignored in the model, which means that these models are prone to over- or under simulation, resulting in a large deviation from reality. An effective means of accounting for the influence of spatial heterogeneity on the quality of the CA model is to establish a partitioned model based on cellular space partitioning. This study established a partitioned, dual-constrained CA model using the area-weighted frequency of land-use change (AWFLUC) to capture its spatial heterogeneity. This model was used to simulate the land-use evolution of the Dianchi Lake watershed. First, the CA space was divided into subzones using a dual-constrained spatial clustering method. Second, an artificial neural network (ANN) was used to automatically acquire conversion rules to construct an ANN-CA model of land-use change. Finally, land-use changes were simulated using the ANN-CA model based on data from 2006 to 2016, and model reliability was validated. The experimental results showed that compared with the non-partitioned CA model, the partitioned counterpart was able to improve the accuracy of land-use change simulation significantly. Furthermore, AWFLUC is an important indicator of the spatial heterogeneity of land-use change. The shapes of the division spaces were more similar to reality and the simulation accuracy was higher when AWFLUC was considered as a land-use change characteristic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted every facet of society. One of the non-pharmacological measures to contain the COVID-19 infection is social distancing. Federal, state, and local governments have placed multiple executive orders for human mobility reduction to slow down the spread of COVID-19. This paper uses geotagged tweets data to reveal the spatiotemporal human mobility patterns during this COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. With New York City open data, human mobility pattern changes were detected by different categories of land use, including residential, parks, transportation facilities, and workplaces. This study further compares human mobility patterns by land use types based on an open social media platform (Twitter) and the human mobility patterns revealed by Google Community Mobility Report cell phone location, indicating that in some applications, open-access social media data can generate similar results to private data. The results of this study can be further used for human mobility analysis and the battle against COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to assess and visualize the Quality of Life provided by urban space as a place of residence. The proposed methodology, after its theoretical documentation, is implemented in Athens Metropolitan Area, Greece. For the evaluation of Urban Quality of Life, a complex index is constructed by using multicriteria analysis. For this purpose, Quality of Life controlling factors such as built space, natural, socioeconomic, and cultural environment, infrastructure and services, and the quality of housing were analyzed within a GIS environment. The mapping of this index led to the identification of areas with different levels of Quality of Life. The results of the research can lead to more effective decision making regarding the planning of targeted actions and the distribution of financial resources to improve the Quality of Life of the residents in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a post-earthquake scenario, the semantic enrichment of 3D building models with seismic damage is crucial from the perspective of disaster management. This paper aims to present the methodology and the results for the Level of Detail 3 (LOD3) building modelling (after an earthquake) with the enrichment of the semantics of the seismic damage based on the European Macroseismic Scale (EMS-98). The study area is the Vrisa traditional settlement on the island of Lesvos, Greece, which was affected by a devastating earthquake of Mw = 6.3 on 12 June 2017. The applied methodology consists of the following steps: (a) unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) nadir and oblique images are acquired and photogrammetrically processed for 3D point cloud generation, (b) 3D building models are created based on 3D point clouds and (c) 3D building models are transformed into a LOD3 City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) standard with enriched semantics of the related seismic damage of every part of the building (walls, roof, etc.). The results show that in following this methodology, CityGML LOD3 models can be generated and enriched with buildings' seismic damage. These models can assist in the decision-making process during the recovery phase of a settlement as well as be the basis for its monitoring over time. Finally, these models can contribute to the estimation of the reconstruction cost of the buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographical time-spaces exhibit a series of properties, including space inversion, that turns any representation effort into a complex task. In order to improve the legibility of the representation and leveraging the advances of three-dimensional computer graphics, the aim of the study is to propose a new method extending time-space relief cartography introduced by Mathis and L'Hostis. The novelty of the model resides in the use of cones to describing the terrestrial surface instead of graph faces, and in the use of curves instead of broken segments for edges. We implement the model on the Chinese space. The Chinese geographical time-space of reference year 2006 is produced by the combination and the confrontation of the fast air transport system and of the 7.5-times slower road transport system. Slower, short range flights are represented as curved lines above the earth surface with longer length than the geodesic, in order to account for a slower speed. The very steep slope of cones expresses the relative difficulty of crossing terrestrial time-space, as well as the comparably extreme efficiency of long-range flights for moving between cities. Finally, the whole image proposes a coherent representation of the geographical time-space where fast city-to-city transport is combined with slow terrestrial systems that allow one to reach any location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Core samples obtained from scientific drilling could provide large volumes of direct microstructural and compositional data, but generating results via the traditional treatment of such data is often time-consuming and inefficient. Unifying microstructural data within a spatially referenced Geographic Information System (GIS) environment provides an opportunity to readily locate, visualize, correlate, and apply remote sensing techniques to the data. Using 26 core billet samples from the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD), this study developed GIS-based procedures for: 1. Spatially referenced visualization and storage of various microstructural data from core billets; 2. 3D modeling of billets and thin section positions within each billet, which serve as a digital record after irreversible fragmentation of the physical billets; and 3. Vector feature creation and unsupervised classification of a multi-generation calcite vein network from cathodluminescence (CL) imagery. Building on existing work which is predominantly limited to the 2D space of single thin sections, our results indicate that a GIS can facilitate spatial treatment of data even at centimeter to nanometer scales, but also revealed challenges involving intensive 3D representations and complex matrix transformations required to create geographically translated forms of the within-billet coordinate systems, which are suggested for consideration in future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrastructures play an important role in urbanization and economic activities but are vulnerable. Due to unavailability of accurate subsurface infrastructure maps, ensuring the sustainability and resilience often are poorly recognized. In the current paper a 3D topographical predictive model using distributed geospatial data incorporated with evolutionary gene expression programming (GEP) was developed and applied on a concrete-face rockfill dam (CFRD) in Guilan province- northern to generate spatial variation of the subsurface bedrock topography. The compared proficiency of the GEP model with geostatistical ordinary kriging (OK) using different analytical indexes showed 82.53% accuracy performance and 9.61% improvement in precisely labeled data. The achievements imply that the retrieved GEP model efficiently can provide accurate enough prediction and consequently meliorate the visualization insights linking the natural and engineering concerns. Accordingly, the generated subsurface bedrock model dedicates great information on stability of structures and hydrogeological properties, thus adopting appropriate foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the exponential growth of numerous drone operations ranging from infrastructure monitoring to even package delivery services, the integration of UAS in the smart city transportation systems is an actual task that requires radically new, sustainable (safe, secure, with minimum environmental impact and life cycle cost) solutions. The primary objective of this proposed option is the definition of routes as desired and commanded trajectories and their autonomous execution. The airspace structure and fixed routes are given in the global GPS reference system with supporting GIS mapping. The concept application requires a series of further studies and solutions as drone trajectory (or corridor) following by an autonomous trajectory tracking control system, coupled with autonomous conflict detection, resolution, safe drone following, and formation flight options. The second part of the paper introduces such possible models and shows some results of their verification tests. Drones will be connected with the agency, designed trajectories to support them with factual information on trajectories and corridors. While the agency will use trajectory elements to design fixed or desired trajectories, drones may use the conventional GPS, infrared, acoustic, and visual sensors for positioning and advanced navigation. The accuracy can be improved by unique markers integrated into the infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distinct, alternative forms of geosemantics, whose classification is often ill-defined, emerge in the management of geospatial information. This paper proposes a workflow to identify patterns in the different practices and methods dealing with geoinformation. From a meta-review of the state of the art in geosemantics, this paper first pinpoints "keywords" representing key concepts, challenges, methods, and technologies. Then, we illustrate several case studies, following the categorization into implicit, formal, and powerful (i.e., soft) semantics depending on the kind of their input. Finally, we associate the case studies with the previously identified keywords and compute their similarities in order to ascertain if distinguishing methodologies, techniques, and challenges can be related to the three distinct forms of semantics. The outcomes of the analysis sheds some light on the diverse methods and technologies that are more suited to model and deal with specific forms of geosemantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban functional regions are essential information in parsing urban spatial structure. The rapid and accurate identification of urban functional regions is important for improving urban planning and management. Thanks to its low cost and fast data update characteristics, the Point of Interest (POI) is one of the most common types of open access data. It mainly identifies urban functional regions by analyzing the potential correlation between POI data and the regions. Even though this is an important manifestation of the functional region, the spatial correlation between regions is rarely considered in previous studies. In order to extract the spatial semantic information among regions, a new model, called the Block2vec, is proposed by using the idea of the Skip-gram framework. The Block2vec model maps the spatial correlation between the POIs, as well as the regions, to a high-dimensional vector, in which classification of urban functional regions can be better performed. The results from cluster analysis showed that the high-dimensional vector extracted can well distinguish the regions with different functions. The random forests classification result (Overall accuracy = 0.7186, Kappa = 0.6429) illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. This study also verified the potential of the sentence embedding model in the semantic information extraction of POIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasting the motion of surrounding vehicles is necessary for an autonomous driving system applied in complex traffic. Trajectory prediction helps vehicles make more sensible decisions, which provides vehicles with foresight. However, traditional models consider the trajectory prediction as a simple sequence prediction task. The ignorance of inter-vehicle interaction and environment influence degrades these models in real-world datasets. To address this issue, we propose a novel Dynamic and Static Context-aware Attention Network named DSCAN in this paper. The DSCAN utilizes an attention mechanism to dynamically decide which surrounding vehicles are more important at the moment. We also equip the DSCAN with a constraint network to consider the static environment information. We conducted a series of experiments on a real-world dataset, and the experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our model. Moreover, the present study suggests that the attention mechanism and static constraints enhance the prediction results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multifractal theory provides a reliable method for the scientific quantification of the geomorphological features of basins. However, most of the existing research has investigated small and medium-sized basins rather than complex and large basins. In this study, the Yellow River Basin and its sub-basins were selected as the research areas, and the generalized fractal dimension and multifractal spectrum were computed and analyzed with a multifractal technique based on the slope distribution probability. The results showed that the Yellow River Basin and its sub-basins exhibit clear multifractal characteristics, which indicates that the multifractal theory can be applied well to the analysis of large-scale basin geomorphological features. We also concluded that the region with the most uneven terrain is the Yellow River Downstream Basin with the "overhanging river", followed by the Weihe River Basin, the Yellow River Mainstream Basin, and the Fenhe River Basin. Multifractal analysis can reflect the geomorphological feature information of the basins comprehensively with the generalized fractal dimension and the multifractal spectrum. There is a strong correlation between some common topographic parameters and multifractal parameters, and the correlation coefficients between them are greater than 0.8. The results provide a scientific basis for analyzing the geomorphic characteristics of large-scale basins and for the further research of the morphogenesis of the forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of international migration and its societal and political impacts bring a greater need for accurate data to measure, understand and control migration flows. However, in the Czech immigration database, the birthplaces of immigrants are only kept in freeform text fields, a substantial obstacle to their further processing due to numerous errors in transcription and spelling. This study overcomes this obstacle by deploying a custom geocoding engine based on GeoNames, tailored transcription rules and fuzzy matching in order to achieve good accuracy even for noisy data while not depending on third-party services, resulting in lower costs than the comparable approaches. The results are presented on a subnational level for the immigrants coming to Czechia from the USA, Ukraine, Moldova and Vietnam, revealing important spatial patterns that are invisible on the national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of very-high-resolution images to extract urban, suburban and rural roads has important application value. However, it is still a problem to effectively extract the road area occluded by roadside tree canopy or high-rise buildings to maintain the integrity of the extracted road area, the smoothness of the sideline and the connectivity of the road network. This paper proposes an innovative Cascaded Attention DenseUNet (CADUNet) semantic segmentation model by embedding two attention modules, such as global attention and core attention modules, in the DenseUNet framework. First, a set of cascaded global attention modules are introduced to obtain the contextual information of the road; secondly, a set of cascaded core attention modules are embedded to ensure that the road information is transmitted to the greatest extent among the dense blocks in the network, and further assist the global attention module in acquiring multi-scale road information, thereby improving the connectivity of the road network while restoring the integrity of the road area shaded by the tree canopy and high-rise buildings. Based on binary cross entropy, an adaptive loss function is proposed for network parameter tuning. Experiments on the Massachusetts road dataset and the DeepGlobe-CVPR 2018 road dataset show that this semantic segmentation model can effectively extract the road area shaded by tree canopy and improve the connectivity of the road network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changing land-use patterns in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP) due to natural factors and human interference have led to higher ecological vulnerability and even more underlying issues related to time and space in this alpine area. Ecological vulnerability assessment provides not only a solution to surface-feature-related problems but also insight into sustainable eco-environmental planning and resource management as a response to potential climate changes if driving factors are known. In this study, the ecological vulnerability index (EVI) of Shannan City in the core area of the QTP was assessed using a selected set of ecological, social, and economic indicators and spatial principal component analysis (SPCA) to calculate their weights. The data included Landsat images and socio-economic data from 1990 to 2015, at five-year intervals. The results showed that the total EVI remains at a medium vulnerability level, with minor fluctuations over 25 years (peaks in 2000, when there was a sudden increase in slight vulnerability, which switched to extreme vulnerability), and gradually increases from east to west. In addition, spatial analysis showed a distinct positive correlation between the EVI and land-use degree, livestock husbandry output, desertification area, and grassland area. The artificial afforestation program (AAP) has a positive effect by preventing the environment from becoming more vulnerable. The results provide practical information and suggestions for planners to take measures to improve the land-use degree in urban and pastoral areas in the QTP based on spatial-temporal heterogeneity patterns of the EVI of Shannan City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trajectory compression is an efficient way of removing noise and preserving key features in location-based applications. This paper focuses on the dynamic compression of trajectory in memory, where the compression accuracy of trajectory changes dynamically with the different application scenarios. Existing methods can achieve this by adjusting the compression parameters. However, the relationship between the parameters and compression accuracy of most of these algorithms is considerably complex and varies with different trajectories, which makes it difficult to provide reasonable accuracy. We propose a novel trajectory compression algorithm that is based on the finite element method, in which the trajectory is taken as an elastomer to compress as a whole by elasticity theory, and trajectory compression can be thought of as deformation under stress. The compression accuracy can be determined by the stress size that is applied to the elastomer. When compared with the existing methods, the experimental results show that our method can provide more stable, data-independent compression accuracy under the given stress parameters, and with reasonable performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicle trajectories derived from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are used in various traffic applications based on trajectory quality analysis for the development of successful traffic models. A trajectory consists of points and links that are connected, where both the points and links are subject to positioning errors in the GNSS. Existing trajectory filters focus on point outliers, but neglect link outliers on tracks caused by a long sampling interval. In this study, four categories of link outliers are defined, i.e., radial, drift, clustered, and shortcut; current available algorithms are applied to filter apparent point outliers for the first three categories, and a novel filtering approach is proposed for link outliers of the fourth category in urban areas using spatial reasoning rules without ancillary data. The proposed approach first measures specific geometric properties of links from trajectory databases and then evaluates the similarities of geometric measures among the links, following a set of spatial reasoning rules to determine link outliers. We tested this approach using taxi trajectory datasets for Beijing with a built-in sampling interval of 50 to 65 s. The results show that clustered links (27.14%) account for the majority of link outliers, followed by shortcut (6.53%), radial (3.91%), and drift (0.62%) outliers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decision-making methods used in geospatial decision making are computationally complex prescriptive methods, the details of which are rarely transparent to the decision maker. However, having a deep understanding of the details and mechanisms of the applied method is a prerequisite for the efficient use thereof. In this paper, we present a novel decision-making framework that emanates from the need for intuitive and easy-to-use decision support systems for geospatial multi-criteria decision making. The framework consists of two parts: the decision-making model Even Swaps on Reduced Data Sets (ESRDS), and the interactive visualization framework. The decision-making model is based on the concept of satisficing, and as such, it is intuitive and easy to understand and apply. It integrates even swaps, a prescriptive decision-making method, with the findings of behavioural decision-making theories. Providing visual feedback and interaction opportunities throughout the decision-making process, the interactive visualization part of the framework helps the decision maker gain better insight into the decision space and attribute dependencies. Furthermore, it provides the means to analyse and compare the outcomes of different scenarios and decision paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the relationship between cellular phone data and housing prices in Budapest, Hungary. We determine mobility indicators from one months of Call Detail Records (CDR) data, while the property price data are used to characterize the socioeconomic status at the Capital of Hungary. First, we validated the proposed methodology by comparing the Home and Work locations estimation and the commuting patterns derived from the cellular network dataset with reports of the national mini census. We investigated the statistical relationships between mobile phone indicators, such as Radius of Gyration, the distance between Home and Work locations or the Entropy of visited cells, and measures of economic status based on housing prices. Our findings show that the mobility correlates significantly with the socioeconomic status. We performed Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on combined vectors of mobility indicators in order to characterize the dependence of mobility habits on socioeconomic status. The results of the PCA investigation showed remarkable correlation of housing prices and mobility customs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mapping and understanding the differences in land cover and land use over time is an essential component of decision-making in sectors such as resource management, urban planning, and forest fire management, as well as in tracking of the impacts of climate change. Existing methods sometimes pose a barrier to the effective monitoring of changes in land cover and land use, since a threshold parameter is often needed and determined based on trial and error. This study aimed to develop an automatic and operational method for change detection on a large scale from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. Super pixels were the basic unit of analysis instead of traditional individual pixels. T2 tests based on the feature vectors of temporal Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and land surface temperature were used for change detection. The developed method was applied to data over a predominantly vegetated area in northern Ontario, Canada spanning 120,000 sq. km from 2001–2016. The accuracies ranged between 78% and 88% for the NDVI-based test, from 74% to 86% for the LST-based test, and from 70% to 86% for the joint method compared with manual interpretation. Our proposed method for detecting land cover change provides a functional and viable alternative to existing methods of land cover change detection as it is reliable, repeatable, and free from uncertainty in establishing a threshold for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2019, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic attacked Wuhan, China. The city government soon strictly locked down the city, implemented a hierarchical diagnosis and treatment system, and took a series of unprecedented pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical measures. The residents' access to the medical resources and the consequently potential demand–supply tension may determine effective diagnosis and treatment, for which travel distance and time are key indicators. Using the Application Programming Interface (API) of Baidu Map, we estimated the travel distance and time from communities to the medical facilities capable of treating COVID-19 patients, and we identified the service areas of those facilities as well. The results showed significant differences in service areas and potential loading across medical facilities. The accessibility of medical facilities in the peripheral areas was inferior to those in the central areas; there was spatial inequality of medical resources within and across districts; the amount of community healthcare centers was insufficient; some communities were underserved regarding walking distance; some medical facilities could be potentially overloaded. This study provides reference, in the context of Wuhan, for understanding the spatial aspect of medical resources and residents' relevant mobility under the emergency regulation, and re-examining the coordination of emergency to improve future planning and utilization of medical facilities at various levels. The approach can facilitate policymakers to assess potential loading of medical facilities, identify low-accessibility areas, and deploy new medical facilities. It also implies that the accessibility analysis can be rapid and relevant even only with open-source data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of location-based services facilitates the use of location data for detecting urban events. Currently, most studies based on location data model the pattern of an urban dynamic and then extract the anomalies, which deviate significantly from the pattern as urban events. However, few studies have considered the long temporal dependency of sentiment strength in geotagged social media data, and thus it is difficult to further improve the reliability of detection results. In this paper, we combined a sentiment analysis method and long short-term memory neural network for detecting urban events with geotagged social media data. We first applied a dictionary-based method to evaluate the positive and negative sentiment strength. Based on long short-term memory neural network, the long temporal dependency of sentiment strength in geotagged social media data was constructed. By considering the long temporal dependency, daily positive and negative sentiment strength are predicted. We extracted anomalies that deviated significantly from the prediction as urban events. For each event, event-related information was obtained by analyzing social media texts. Our results indicate that the proposed approach is a cost-effective way to detect urban events, such as festivals, COVID-19-related events and traffic jams. In addition, compared to existing methods, we found that accounting for a long temporal dependency of sentiment strength can significantly improve the reliability of event detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of disaster management efforts demands meaningful integration of data that is geographically dispersed and owned by stakeholders in various sectors. However, the difficulty in finding, accessing and reusing interoperable vocabularies to organise disaster management data creates a challenge for collaboration among stakeholders in the disaster management cycle on data integration tasks. Thus the need to implement FAIR principles that describe the desired features ontologies should possess to maximize sharing and reuse by humans and machines. In this review, we explore the extent to which sharing and reuse of disaster management knowledge in the domain is inline with FAIR recommendations. We achieve this through a systematic search and review of publications in the disaster management domain based on a predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. We then extract social-technical features in selected studies and evaluate retrieved ontologies against the FAIR maturity model for semantic artefacts. Results reveal that low numbers of ontologies representing disaster management knowledge are resolvable via URIs. Moreover, 90.9% of URIs to the downloadable disaster management ontology artefacts do not conform to the principle of uniqueness and persistence. Also, only 1.4% of all retrieved ontologies are published in semantic repositories and 84.1% are not published at all because there are no repositories dedicated to archiving disaster domain knowledge. Therefore, there exists a very low level of Findability (1.8%) or Accessibility (5.8%), while Interoperability and Reusability are moderate (49.1% and 30.2 % respectively). The low adherence of disaster vocabularies to FAIR Principles poses a challenge to disaster data integration tasks because of the limited ability to reuse previous knowledge during disaster management phases. By using FAIR indicators to evaluate the maturity in sharing, discovery and integration of disaster management ontologies, we reveal potential research opportunities for managing reusable and evolving knowledge in the disaster community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In a world where every municipality is pursuing the goals of more sustainable mobility, bicycles play a fundamental role in getting rid of private cars and travelling by an eco-friendly mode of transport. Additionally, private and shared bikes can be used as a feeder transit system, solving the problem of the first- and last-mile trips. Thanks to GIS (Geographic Information System) software, it is possible to evaluate the effectiveness of such a sustainable means of transport in future users' modal choice. Methods: Running an accessibility analysis of cycling and rail transport services, the potential mobility demand attracted by these services and the possible multimodality between bicycle and rail transport systems can be assessed. Moreover, thanks to a modal choice model calibrated for high school students, it could be verified if students will be really motivated to adopt this solution for their home-to-school trips. Results: The GIS-based analysis showed that almost half of the active population in the study area might potentially abandon the use of their private car in favour of a bike and its combination with public transport systems; furthermore, the percentage of the students of one high school of Palermo, the Einstein High School, sharply increases from 1.5% up to 10.1%, thanks also to the combination with the rail transport service. Conclusions: The GIS-based methodology shows that multimodal transport can be an effective way to pursue a more sustainable mobility in cities and efficiently connect suburbs with low-frequent public transport services to the main public transport nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geo-social media data are widely used as a data source to model populations and processes in a variety of contexts. However, if the data do not adequately represent the population they are drawn from, analysis results will be biased. Unaddressed, these biases may lead to false interpretations and conclusions. In this paper, we propose a generic methodology for investigating the representativeness of geo-social media data for population groups of similar statistical predictive power based on reference data. The groups are designed to be spatially coherent regions with similar prediction errors. Based on these units, we investigate the influence of different socio-demographic covariates on the representativeness. We perform experiments based on over 1.6 billion tweets and 90 socio-demographic covariates. We demonstrate that Twitter data representativeness varies strongly over time and space. Our results show that densely populated areas tend to be underrepresented consistently in non-spatial models. Over time, some covariates like the number of people aged 20 years exhibit highly different effects on the prediction models, whereas others are much more stable. The spatial effects can most frequently be explained using spatial error models, indicating spatially related errors that indicate the necessity of additional covariates. Finally, we provide hints for interpreting the results of our approach for researchers using the concepts presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of electric vehicles (EVs) around the world, debates have arisen with regard to their impacts on people's lifestyles and urban space. Mining spatio-temporal patterns from increasingly smart city sensors and personal mobile devices have become an important approach in understanding the interaction between human activity and urban space. In this study, we used location-based service data to identify EV owners and capture the distribution of home and charging stations. The research goal was to investigate that how the urban form in regions under rapid urbanization is driven by EV use, from a geographical perspective. Using a case study of the expanding metropolis of Beijing, GIS-based spatial statistical analysis was conducted to characterize the spatial-pattern of the homes of EV owners as well as their charging preferences. Our results indicate that the spatial clustering of the homes of EV owners in non-urban central areas—suburban areas—is significantly higher than that in urban central areas. According to the records of visits to charging stations, the spatial interaction distance between the dwellings of EV owners and their visits to charging stations exhibits significant distance attenuation characteristics. 88% of EV owners in this research travels within 40 km (Euclidean distance) between housing and charging stations. At the same time, there were significant differences in the spatial patterns between working days and non-working days which are affected by commuting activities. The three types of urban spatial interaction patterns were identified and categorized by visualization. This transformation to EV use in the city influences several aspects of people's decisions and behaviors in life. Understanding the impacts will provide valuable information for the development of EVs and their implications in the electrification of transportation, smart planning, and sustainable urbanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective predictive policing can guide police patrols and deter crime. Hourly crime prediction is expected to save police time. The selection of spatial resolution is important due to its strong relationship with the accuracy of crime prediction. In this paper, we propose an adaptive spatial resolution method to select the best spatial resolution for hourly crime prediction. The ST-ResNet model is applied to predict crime risk, with historical crime data and weather data as predictive variables. A prediction accuracy index (PAI) is used to evaluate the accuracy of the results. Data on property crimes committed in Suzhou, a big city in China, were selected as the research data. The experiment results indicate that a 2.4 km spatial resolution leads to the best performance for crime prediction. The adaptive spatial resolution method can be used to guide police deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic congestion in expressway networks has a strong negative influence on regional development. Understanding the spatiotemporal patterns of traffic congestion in expressway networks is critical for improving the exchange of products in regional production and promoting regional economic development. Nevertheless, existing studies pay less attention to these spatiotemporal patterns of traffic congestion. Considering that Origin–Destination (OD) data are available for the recorded spatial movements of vehicles in expressways, this study proposes a method with which to explore traffic congestion at the level of road segments in the regional expressway network, the mainstream of driving behaviors, and traffic regulations. Methods for analyzing spatial disparity and temporal changes in traffic congestion in expressway networks are also put forward in this paper. The empirical results show that the proposed methods could detect road segments where traffic congestion happens, and then uncover temporal patterns of several congested locations and spatial patterns of road segments with frequent congestion. These spatiotemporal patterns of traffic congestion could be in accord with the actual situation. This study provides a new approach to investigating traffic congestion in expressway networks based on low-cost data, which might be helpful for optimizing expressway network planning and promoting balanced regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project passes through the Karakoram Highway in northern Pakistan, which is one of the most hazardous regions of the world. The most common hazards in this region are landslides and debris flows, which result in loss of life and severe infrastructure damage every year. This study assessed geohazards (landslides and debris flows) and developed susceptibility maps by considering four standalone machine-learning and statistical approaches, namely, Logistic Regression (LR), Shannon Entropy (SE), Weights-of-Evidence (WoE), and Frequency Ratio (FR) models. To this end, geohazard inventories were prepared using remote sensing techniques with field observations and historical hazard datasets. The spatial relationship of thirteen conditioning factors, namely, slope (degree), distance to faults, geology, elevation, distance to rivers, slope aspect, distance to road, annual mean rainfall, normalized difference vegetation index, profile curvature, stream power index, topographic wetness index, and land cover, with hazard distribution was analyzed. The results showed that faults, slope angles, elevation, lithology, land cover, and mean annual rainfall play a key role in controlling the spatial distribution of geohazards in the study area. The final susceptibility maps were validated against ground truth points and by plotting Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) curves. According to the AUROC curves, the success rates of the LR, WoE, FR, and SE models were 85.30%, 76.00, 74.60%, and 71.40%, and their prediction rates were 83.10%, 75.00%, 73.50%, and 70.10%, respectively; these values show higher performance of LR over the other three models. Furthermore, 11.19%, 9.24%, 10.18%, 39.14%, and 30.25% of the areas corresponded to classes of very-high, high, moderate, low, and very-low susceptibility, respectively. The developed geohazard susceptibility map can be used by relevant government officials for the smooth implementation of the CPEC project at the regional scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A city is a complex system that never sleeps; it constantly changes, and its internal mobility (people, vehicles, goods, information, etc.) continues to accelerate and intensify. These changes and mobility vary in terms of the attributes of the city, such as space, time and cultural affiliation, which characterise to some extent how the city functions. Traditional urban studies have successfully modelled the 'low-frequency city' and have provided solutions such as urban planning and highway design for long-term urban development. Nevertheless, the existing urban studies and theories are insufficient to model the dynamics of a city's intense mobility and rapid changes, so they cannot tackle short-term urban problems such as traffic congestion, real-time transport scheduling and resource management. The advent of information and communication technology and big data presents opportunities to model cities with unprecedented resolution. Since 2018, a paradigm shift from modelling the 'low-frequency city' to the so-called 'high-frequency city' has been introduced, but hardly any research investigated methods to estimate a city's frequency. This work aims to propose a framework for the identification and analysis of indicators to model and better understand the concept of a high-frequency city in a systematic manner. The methodology for this work was based on a content analysis-based review, taking into account specific criteria to ensure the selection of indicator sets that are consistent with the concept of the frequency of cities. Twenty-two indicators in five groups were selected as indicators for a high-frequency city, and a framework was proposed to assess frequency at both the intra-city and inter-city levels. This work would serve as a pilot study to further illuminate the ways that urban policy and operations can be adjusted to improve the quality of city life in the context of a smart city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital 3D capture and reliable reproduction of architectural features is the first and most difficult step towards defining a heritage BIM. Three-dimensional digital survey technologies, such as TLS and photogrammetry, enable experts to scan buildings with a new level of detail. Challenges in the tracing of parametric objects in a TLS point cloud include the reconstruction of occluded parts, measurement of uncertainties relevant to surface reflectivity, and edge detection and location. In addition to image-based techniques being considered cost effective, highly flexible, and efficient in producing a high-quality 3D textured model, they also provide a better interpretation of surface linear characteristics. This article addresses an architecture survey workflow using photogrammetry and TLS to optimize a point cloud that is sufficient for a reliable HBIM. Fusion-based workflows were proposed during the recording of two heritage sites—the Matbouli House Museum in Historic Jeddah, a UNESCO World Heritage Site; and Asfan Castle. In the Matbouli House Museum building, which is rich with complex architectural features, multi-sensor recording was implemented at different resolutions and levels of detail. The TLS data were used to reconstruct the basic shape of the main structural elements, while the imagery's superior radiometric data and accessibility were effectively used to enhance the TLS point clouds for improving the geometry, data interpretation, and parametric tracing of irregular objects in the facade. Furthermore, in the workflow that is considered to be the ragged terrain of the Castle of Asfan, here, the TLS point cloud was supplemented with UAV data in the upper building zones where the shadow data originated. Both datasets were registered using an ICP algorithm to scale the photogrammetric data and define their actual position in the construction system. The hybrid scans were imported and processed in the BIM environment. The building components were segmented and classified into regular and irregular surfaces, in order to perform detailed building information modeling of the architectural elements. The proposed workflows demonstrated an appropriate performance in terms of reliable and complete BIM mapping in the complex structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial distribution of fire stations is an important component of both urban development and urban safety. For expanding mega-cities, land-use and building function are subject to frequent changes, hence a complete picture of risk profiles is likely to be lacking. Challenges for prevention can be overwhelming for city managers and emergency responders. In this context, we use points of interest (POI) data and multi-time traffic situation (MTS) data to investigate the actual coverage of fire stations in central Beijing under different traffic situations. A method for identifying fire risks of mega cities and optimizing the spatial distribution of fire stations was proposed. First, fire risks associated with distinctive building and land-use functions and their spatial distribution were evaluated using POI data and kernel density analysis. Furthermore, based on the MTS data, a multi-scenario road network was constructed. The "location-allocation" (L-A) model and network analysis were used to map the spatial coverage of the fire stations in the study area, optimized by combining different targets (e.g., coverage of high fire risk areas, important fire risk types). Results show that the top 10% of Beijing's fire risk areas are concentrated in "Sanlitun-Guomao", "Ditan-Nanluogu-Wangfujing", and "Shuangjing-Panjiayuan", as well as at Beijing Railway Station. Under a quarterly average traffic situation, existing fire stations within the study area exhibit good overall POI coverage (96.51%) within a five-minute response time. However, the coverage in the northwest and southwest, etc. (e.g., Shijicheng and Minzhuang) remain insufficient. On weekdays and weekends, the coverage of fire stations in the morning and evening rush hours fluctuates. Considering the factors of high fire risk areas, major fire risk types, etc. the results of optimization show that 15 additional fire stations are needed to provide sufficient coverage. The methods and results of this research have positive significance for future urban safety planning of mega-cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the target of burglars is generally the property of the inhabitant, it is crucial to accurately measure potential victims when analyzing burglaries, especially in small areas. Previous studies on burglary are mostly based on large units such as census tracts or communities. One of the difficulties is the measurement of the potential victims of burglary at the mesoscale. We compare the measuring effects of census population, census households, nighttime mobile phone users, and nighttime social media, such as the Tencent regional heatmap (TRH), on potential victims of burglary on 150 m × 150 m grids. Based on the rational choice theory, and controlling for the potentially confounding effects of risks and cost, we show that the TRH performed best, followed by census households and census population, and phone users performed poorly. The best-performing time period for TRH data was 3:00–5:00 am on weekends. These findings could lead to an improved measurement of potential victims of burglary at the mesoscale, and could provide scientific insight for crime prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dwarf eelgrass Zostera noltei Hornemann (Z. noltei) is the most dominant seagrass in semi-enclosed coastal systems of the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The species is experiencing a worldwide decline and monitoring the extent of its meadows would be a useful approach to estimate the impacts of natural and anthropogenic stressors. Here, we aimed to map the Z. noltei meadows in the Merja Zerga coastal lagoon (Atlantic coast of Morocco) using remote sensing. We used a random forest algorithm combined with field data to classify a SPOT 7 satellite image. Despite the difficulties related to the non-synchronization of the satellite images with the high tide coefficient, our results revealed, with an accuracy of 95%, that dwarf eelgrass beds can be discriminated successfully from other habitats in the lagoon. The estimated area was 160.76 ha when considering mixed beds (Z. noltei-associated macroalgae). The use of SPOT 7 satellite images seems to be satisfactory for long-term monitoring of Z. noltei meadows in the Merja Zerga lagoon and for biomass estimation using an NDVI–biomass quantitative relationship. Nevertheless, using this method of biomass estimation for dwarf eelgrass meadows could be unsuccessful when it comes to areas where the NDVI is saturated due to the stacking of many layers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the significant hotspots analysis method (Getis-Ord Gi* significance statistics), space-time cube model (STC) and the Mann–Kendall trend test method, this paper proposes a G-STC-M spatio-temporal analysis method based on Archaeological Sites. This method can integrate spatio-temporal data variable analysis and the space-time cube model to explore the spatio-temporal distribution of Archaeological Sites. The G-STC-M method was used to conduct time slice analysis on the data of Archaeological Sites in the study area, and the spatio-temporal variation characteristics of Archaeological Sites in East China from the Tang Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty were discussed. The distribution of Archaeological Sites has temporal hotspots and spatial hotspots. Temporally, the distribution of Archaeological Sites showed a gradual increasing trend, and the number of Archaeological Sites reached the maximum in the Qing Dynasty. Spatially, the hotspots of Archaeological Sites are mainly distributed in Jiangsu (30°~33° N, 118°~121° E) and Anhui (29°~31° N, 117°~119° E) and the central region of Zhejiang (28°~31° N, 118°~121° E). Temporally and spatially, the distribution of Archaeological Sites is mainly centered in Shanghai (30°~32° N, 121°~122° E), spreading to the southern region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Encryption of vector maps, used for copyright protection, is of importance in the community of geographic information sciences. However, some studies adopt one-to-one mapping to scramble vertices and permutate the coordinates one by one according to the coordinate position in a plain map. An attacker can easily obtain the key values by analyzing the relationship between the cipher vector map and the plain vector map, which will lead to the ineffectiveness of the scrambling operation. To solve the problem, a vector map encryption algorithm based on a double random position permutation strategy is proposed in this paper. First, the secret key sequence is generated using a four-dimensional quadratic autonomous hyperchaotic system. Then, all coordinates of the vector map are encrypted using the strategy of double random position permutation. Lastly, the encrypted coordinates are reorganized according to the vector map structure to obtain the cipher map. Experimental results show that: (1) one-to-one mapping between the plain vector map and cipher vector map is prevented from happening; (2) scrambling encryption between different map objects is achieved; (3) hackers cannot obtain the permutation key value by analyzing the pairs of the plain map and cipher map. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluates the spatial-temporal patterns in Virginia tornadoes using the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center's Severe Weather GIS (SVRGIS) database. In addition to descriptive statistics, the analysis employs Kernel Density Estimation for spatial pattern analysis and space-time cubes to visualize the spatiotemporal frequency of tornadoes and potential trends. Most of the 726 tornadoes between 1960–2019 occurred in Eastern Virginia, along the Piedmont and Coastal Plain. Consistent with other literature, both the number of tornadoes and the tornado days have increased in Virginia. While 80% of the tornadoes occurred during the warm season, tornadoes did occur during each month including two deadly tornadoes in January and February. Over the 60-year period, a total of 28 people were killed in the Commonwealth. Most tornado activity took place in the afternoon and early evening hours drawing attention to the temporal variability of risk and vulnerability. Spatial analysis results identify significant, non-random clusters of tornado activity and increasing temporal frequency. While this study improves weather-related literacy and addresses a need in the Commonwealth, more research is necessary to further evaluate the synoptic and mesoscale mechanisms of Virginia tornadoes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maize (Zea mays L.), one of the most important agricultural crops in the world, which can be devastated by lodging, which can strike maize during its growing season. Maize lodging affects not only the yield but also the quality of its kernels. The identification of lodging is helpful to evaluate losses due to natural disasters, to screen lodging-resistant crop varieties, and to optimize field-management strategies. The accurate detection of crop lodging is inseparable from the accurate determination of the degree of lodging, which helps improve field management in the crop-production process. An approach was developed that fuses supervised and object-oriented classifications on spectrum, texture, and canopy structure data to determine the degree of lodging with high precision. The results showed that, combined with the original image, the change of the digital surface model, and texture features, the overall accuracy of the object-oriented classification method using random forest classifier was the best, which was 86.96% (kappa coefficient was 0.79). The best pixel-level supervised classification of the degree of maize lodging was 78.26% (kappa coefficient was 0.6). Based on the spatial distribution of degree of lodging as a function of crop variety, sowing date, densities, and different nitrogen treatments, this work determines how feature factors affect the degree of lodging. These results allow us to rapidly determine the degree of lodging of field maize, determine the optimal sowing date, optimal density and optimal fertilization method in field production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]