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Forest therapy is an emerging holistic health practice that uses multisensory immersive engagements in forest settings to achieve health and wellbeing outcomes. Many forest therapy engagements take place via slow walks along a trail to optimally experience the array of sensory phenomena afforded along the route, yet surprisingly few forest therapy studies to date have investigated the characteristics of forest sites and trails that give rise to healthful experiences. In this research, we employ a hybrid approach to understand the conditions and features that contribute to a good forest therapy trail, using interviews with forest therapy guides to identify and highlight concepts for further refinement and structuring via a broad, integrative review of the relevant research and planning literature. Through this iterative approach, we identify and describe three site-related criteria (landscape character and quality, tranquility, and accessibility) and two trail-related criteria (design and construction and key features and qualities), each with a number of sub-criteria detailing specific conditions and considerations. This effort helps build a conceptual foundation and evidence base for assessment procedures that can be used to identify existing trails and design new ones that meet the needs of forest planners, managers, guides, and participants for the growing international practice of forest therapy.

While most definitions of forest therapy emphasize the role of multisensory, immersive experiences in nature to achieve human health and wellbeing outcomes, reviews of research on forest therapy to date have predominantly focused on outcomes and provide limited insight on the factors and conditions that give rise to nature experiences. In this scoping review we employ a conceptual framework developed in the context of landscape perception research to examine empirical studies of forest therapy in terms of how the fuller process of human, forest, interaction, and outcome components are conceptualized and measured. Our literature search identified 266 studies focused on forest therapy and related activities, which were coded on a number of variables related to each of the four components in our framework. While most studies reported positive mental and/or physiological health outcomes using a wide array of measures, the typical study used small, homogeneous samples of participants who engaged in limited interactions with a forest environment that was minimally described. However, our analysis also identified a wider range of findings with regard to human-forest interactions, which together provide important insights for guiding forest therapy research and the provision of forest therapy trails, settings, and programs.

Image registration is used by the remote sensing community to align images for the purposes of examining changes in a scene. The application in this paper involves finding anomalies associated with human activity for the purpose of detecting underground nuclear explosions. This paper presents a non-rigid image registration algorithm that can be easily implemented using publicly available tools such as python, numpy, scipy, openCV and SIFT. SIFT is used to find feature correspondences between images. An approach based on Mahalanobis distance is used find a subset of robust correspondences. Comparisons are made to the RANSAC algorithm. The imagery was collected by DigitalGlobe’s Worldview-II satellite. One image pair is orthorectified. A second image pair is only geo-registered. Both image pairs were collected over mountainous desert regions, the second image pair has much rougher terrain and presents a challenging situation. The non-rigid property of the image registration algorithm allows for robust registration in mountainous terrain under different viewing geometries. Image differencing of the PAN-chromatic band is used to find changes, some of which are shown in detail for both sets of images. Overall registration improvement is quantified by using the standard deviation of the difference image. The non-rigid warping map was also applied to the multispectral bands of the DigitalGlobe data. This dataset made use of a multivariate change detection algorithm that incorporates the spectral properties of each pixel.

An underground nuclear explosion (UNE) can generate a shock wave that lofts surface material, resulting in surface changes that might be detectable. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) allows ground and airborne spectral and thermal imaging to help locate such events. Landsat 5 data on the 1998 Indian and Pakistani tests are used here to demonstrate that there are detectable changes in surface features which might be used to localize an underground nuclear test and to develop change detection techniques specific to the use of satellite data to support a CTBT on-site inspection. Landsat 5 has been active for over 20 years providing repeat coverage of the Earth's surface every 16 days. Most locations have Landsat data available for a variety of dates, allowing for statistical analysis of the data to understand temporal trends and data variability on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Given the right conditions, these usual patterns of change (such as seasonal changes or weathering) can be discerned from unusual patterns of change, such as features relating to a UNE. This paper extends known change detection techniques to a temporal series of data and shows that multispectral change detection can be used to help localize a UNE.

The National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) requires improved accuracy in the retrieval of sea surface skin temperature (SSTS) from its Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor over the capability to retrieve bulk sea surface temperature (SSTB) that has been demonstrated with currently operational National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites carrying the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor. Statistics show an existing capability to retrieve SSTB with a 1σ accuracy of about 0.8 K in the daytime and 0.6 K with nighttime data. During the NPOESS era, a minimum 1σ SSTS measurement uncertainty of 0.5 K is required during daytime and nighttime conditions, while 0.1 K is desired. Simulations have been performed, using PACEOS™ scene generation software and the multichannel sea surface temperature (MCSST) algorithms developed by NOAA, to better understand the implications of this more stringent requirement on algori...

Orbital collisions pose a hazard to space operations. Using a high performance computer modeling and simulation environment for space situational awareness, we explore a new paradigm for improving satellite conjunction analysis by obtaining more precise orbital information only for those objects that pose a collision risk greater than a defined threshold to a specific set of satellites during a specified time interval. In particular, we assess the improvement in the quality of the conjunction analysis that can be achieved using a distributed network of ground-based telescopes.

We describe modeling and simulation of long-range terrestrial laser communications links between static and mobile platforms. Atmospheric turbulence modeling, along with pointing, tracking and acquisition models are combined to provide an overall capability to estimate communications link performance.

We introduce a wave-optics based simulation code written to model a complete free space laser communications link, including a detailed model of an adaptive optics compensation system. We present the results obtained by this model, where the phase of a communications laser beam is corrected, after it propagates through a turbulent atmosphere. The phase of the received laser beam is measured using a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, and the correction method utilizes a MEMS mirror. Strehl improvement and amount of power coupled to the receiving fiber results for both 1 km horizontal and 28 km slant paths will be presented.

We describe a technique for modeling the character recognition accuracy of an OCR system -- treated as a black box -- on a particular page of printed text based on an examination only of the output top-choice character classifications and, for each, a confidence score such as is supplied by many commercial OCR systems. Latent conditional independence (LCI) models perform better on this task, in our experience, than naive uniform thresholding methods. Given a sufficiently large and representative dataset of OCR (errorful) output and manually proofed (correct) text, we can automatically infer LCI models that exhibit a useful degree of reliability. A collaboration between a PARC research group and a Xerox legacy conversion service bureau has demonstrated that such models can significantly improve the productivity of human proofing staff by triaging -- that is, selecting to bypass manual inspection -- pages whose estimated OCR accuracy exceeds a threshold chosen to ensure that a customer-specified per-page accuracy target will be met with sufficient confidence. We report experimental results on over 1400 pages. Our triage software tools are running in production and will be applied to more than 5 million pages of multi-lingual text.© (2001) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Entanglements of Hawaiian monk seals, Monachus schauinslandi, were documented in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) from 1982 to 1998, and debris which presented a threat of entanglement was inventoried and removed from 1987 to 1996. A total of 173 entanglements was documented. The number of entanglements did not change after implementation of MARPOL Annex V in 1989. Pups and juvenile seals were more likely to become entangled than older seals, and became entangled primarily in nets, whereas entanglement of subadults and adults was more likely to involve line. The subpopulation of seals at Lisianski Island experienced the most entanglements, although Lisianski did not accumulate the most debris. Localized high entanglement rates may gravely affect individual monk seal subpopulations. Accumulation of debris has not diminished since implementation of Annex V, nor has occurrence of derelict drift nets abated since a 1989 moratorium. Debris washing ashore has likely been circulating in the North Pacific Ocean for some time.

The remote measurement of the emissivity of ground materials is of tremendous value in their identification and mapping. Traditional techniques use reflected solar radiation for this measurement for wavelengths shorter than 5 {mu}m. With the development of new techniques, the 10 Jim atmospheric transmission window might also be used for this purpose. Previous work using the multi-angle data acquisition technique demonstrated its utility to determine source thermal emission. Here we find the multi-angle technique can be used to determine the source specular reflectivity to {approximately}0.05 if there is very good system performance (NETD {approx} 0.01 K).

TAISIR, the Temperature and Imaging System Infrared, is a nominally satellite based platform for remote sensing of the earth. One of its design features is to acquire atmospheric data simultaneous with ground data, resulting in minimal dependence on external atmospheric models for data correction. One technique we employ to acquire atmospheric data is a true multi-angle data acquisition technique. Previous techniques have used only two angles. Here we demonstrate the advantage of using a large number of viewing angles to overconstrain the inversion problem for critical atmospheric and source parameters. For reasonable data acquisition scenarios, simulations show source temperature errors of less than 1K should be possible. Tradeoffs between flight geometry, number of look angles,, and system signal-to-noise are given for typical parameter ranges.

TAISIR, temperature and imaging system infrared, is a nominally satellite based platform for remote sensing of the earth. One of its design features is to acquire atmospheric data simultaneous with ground data, resulting in minimal dependence on external atmospheric models for data correction. Extensive modeling of the rms error of determining a ground temperature and emissivity for a gray body has been performed as a function of integration time, spectroscopic resolution of the system, ground emissivity, atmospheric variables, and atmospheric data accuracy. We find that increased resolution improves measurement accuracy by emphasizing those regions where the atmospheric transmission is highest and atmospheric emission/absorption lowest. We find rms temperature errors

Conococheague limestone and dolomite beds form small scale noncylindrical recumbent folds with homoaxial mineral lineations (L9) on a semipenetrative axial plane foliation (S l ). Large scale recumbent folds are noncylindrical and nonplanar, but mineral lineations remain homoaxial on the scale of the area mapped. Analysis of a deformed oolite bed indicates that the rocks have undergone three-dimensional strain involving constriction. S l and L9 mark the principal flattening plane and elongation direction; small folds may have originated by simultaneous buckling in two principal strain directions.

A seismic reflection, gravity, and aeromagnetic reconnaissance was made in the Pensacola Mountains, Antarctica, during the 1965-66 austral summer. Prominent ice streams located between the Neptune and Patuxent Ranges and east of the Forrestal Range overlie channels in the rock surface 2000 meters below sea level which are probably of glacial origin. Seismic reflections show that the Filchner Ice Shelf is 1270 meters thick near its southern margin. Along the boundary between West and East Antarctica, Bouguer anomalies decrease from +60 milligals in West Antarctica to -80 milligals in East Antarctica. An abrupt change in crustal structure across this boundary is required to explainl the 2 milligals per kilometer gradient. This may indicate a fault extending through the crust into the mantle. Aeromagnetic profiles delineate anomalies up to 1800 gamma associated with the basic stratiform intrusion which comprises the Dufek and Forrestal ranges. A probable minimum area of 9500 square kilometers is calculated for the intrusive body on the basis of the magnetic anomalies, making it one of the largest bodies of its type. The extension of this magnetic anominaly across a fault forming the north border of the Pensacola Mountains probably precludes transcurrent movement.