Hemispherical Photography In Forest Science Theory Methods Applications

This book presents practical information about hemispherical photography from the perspectives of field data acquisition, image processing and information retrieval methods. This book is organized into three sections. The first section describes what is hemispherical photography and what are the fundamental elements of forest structure and light interactions within the forest canopy. The second section provides practical information about the equipment, procedures and tools for procuring, processing and analyzing hemispherical photographs. Armed with this information, the third section describes several applications of hemispherical photographs to forestry and natural resource assessment. The book concludes with a discussion about modelling tools and future directions of this rapidly growing field. There is currently no information source on the market that has this comprehensive range of topics combined in a single book. The book will appeal to academics, graduate students, natural resource professionals and researchers alike.

Accurate solar radiation knowledge and its characterization on the Earth’s surface are of high interest in many aspects of environmental and engineering sciences. Modeling of solar irradiance from satellite imagery has become the most widely used method for retrieving solar irradiance information under total sky conditions, particularly in the solar energy community. Solar radiation modeling, forecasting, and characterization continue to be broad areas of study, research, and development in the scientific community. This Special Issue contains a small sample of the current activities in this field. Both the environmental and climatology community, as the solar energy world, share a great interest in improving modeling tools and capabilities for obtaining more reliable and accurate knowledge of solar irradiance components worldwide. The work presented in this Special Issue also remarks on the significant role that remote sensing technologies play in retrieving and forecasting solar radiation information.

Land, as a fundamental resource in regional development, provides major opportunities for farming, housing, urban planning, and financing. In order to meet the requirements of the new era, every state has developed and implemented a series of policies according to its national specificities and to the international regulations and trends. Geospatial Technologies for Effective Land Governance is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the application of the use of GNSS, remote sensing, and GIS. While highlighting topics such as crop management, multispectral images, and irrigation, this publication explores land administration, encompassing both cadastral systems and land registration, as well as the methods of land governance strategies. This book is ideally designed for researchers, agricultural professionals, engineers, environmentalists, land developers, educators, students, and policymakers seeking current research on land and land-based conflicts in urban and rural communities.

This book is devoted to current problems of artificial and computational intelligence including decision-making systems. Collecting, analysis, and processing information are the current directions of modern computer science. Development of new modern information and computer technologies for data analysis and processing in various fields of data mining and machine learning creates the conditions for increasing effectiveness of the information processing by both the decrease of time and the increase of accuracy of the data processing. The book contains of 54 science papers which include the results of research concerning the current directions in the fields of data mining, machine learning, and decision making. The papers are divided in terms of their topic into three sections. The first section "Analysis and Modeling of Complex Systems and Processes" contains of 26 papers, and the second section "Theoretical and Applied Aspects of Decision-Making Systems" contains of 13 papers. There are 15 papers in the third section "Computational Intelligence and Inductive Modeling". The book is focused to scientists and developers in the fields of data mining, machine learning and decision-making systems.

Hemispherical canopy photography is an indirect method for measuring various components of forest canopy structure and solar radiation flux within and below forest canopies. The method utilizes a 180-degree fisheye-lens camera to capture and record the position, size, and shape of openings or gaps in a forest canopy. During late summer 1995, eight sites on southern Vancouver Island were intensively sampled using hemispherical photographic methods. This document describes the general theory, approach, and analytical tools associated with hemispherical canopy photography and computerized image analysis in the context of this research. As a result, a technical protocol has been devised that can be adopted, modified, and improved upon by those interested in using hemispherical techniques for similar research initiatives. Recommendations are made to improve the quality and reliability of future hemispherical image analysis systems. Appendices include information on measurement of fisheye lens distortion and the effect on the calculation of gap fraction magnitude and distribution, and a model for estimating percent open sky and leaf area index.

In the summer of 2003, a workshop was held in Portsmouth, NH, to discuss land measurement techniques for the North American Carbon Program. Over 40 sci- tists representing government agencies, academia and nonprofit research organi- tions located in Canada, the US and Mexico participated. During the course of the workshop a number of topics were discussed, with an emphasis on the following: • The need for an intermediate tier of carbon measurements. This level of study would be more extensive than state-level inventories of the US Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, but less detailed than intensive ecos- tem studies sites such as those in Long Term Ecological Research network. This tier would ideally provide a basis to link and scale remote sensing measurements and inventory data, and supply data required to parameterize existing models (see Wofsy and Harriss 2002, Denning et al. 2005). • The design criteria that such a network of sites should meet. The network and s- pling design should be standardized, but flexible enough to be applied across North America. The design also needs to be efficient enough to be implemented without the need for large field crews, yet robust enough to provide useful information. Finally, the spatial scale must permit easy linkage to remotely sensed data. • The key variables that should be measured at each site, and the frequency of measurement.