PE&RS Journals
In Press Peer Reviewed Articles
As a convenience to ASPRS members, in-press peer reviewed articles approved for publication in forthcoming issues of PE&RS have been made available for members of the society.
October 2013 Issue
Geospatial Web Services for Responding to Ecological Risks Posed by Oil Spills
Anas Altartouri, Eva Ehrnsten, Inari Helle, Riikka Venesjärvi, and Ari Jolma
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The increased maritime oil transportation raises the risk of marine oil spill accidents. An oil spill accident can cause severe harm to the ecosystem. Adequate contingency planning for oil spill and efficient combating operations require ecological data and knowledge to be integrated in tools that facilitate the decision making. A great deal of the decisions required during those operations is of spatial nature, such as defining areas with high priority for safeguarding. Also, real time decision making is required in the operations. All this calls for spatial and on-site accessible tools. We analyze and discuss in this paper geospatial Web services and an application developed for responding to the ecological risk posed by oil spills. The presented case study concerns the Gulf of Finland and the Finnish Archipelago Sea. The results indicate that geospatial services are an efficient method to deliver ecological knowledge and information for oil spill combating.
Geospatial Web-based Sensor Information Model for Integrating Satellite Observation: An Example in The Field of Flood Disaster Management
Chuli Hu, Nengcheng Chen, and Jia Li
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Flood observation-supporting satellite sensors (FO-SSs) are the important geospatial resources to flood disaster management. In the geospatial sensor Web environment, effective flood disaster management requires on-demand integration of instant observation information from the diverse web-ready FO-SSs. We propose a sharable and interoperable Earth Observation Satellite Sensor Information (SSI) model for satellite observations integration. The SSI model reuses and extends the existing metadata standards to be a standard metadata-filled description framework. The SensorModel prototype serving here is to apply the SSI model into FO-SSs, retrieve and visualize the qualified Web-ready FO-SSs. An experiment on the flood emergency in the middle reaches of Yangtze River basin in China is conducted. The results show that, three kinds of users including FO-SSs providers, common emergency responders, and emergency managers can benefit from the proposed FO-SSI model, and the managers can reliably and comprehensively integrate the satisfied Web-ready FO-SSs to guide the scheduling of the required observation activities.
Web-service-based Monitoring and Analysis of Global Agricultural Drought
Meixia Deng, Liping Di, Weiguo Han, Ali L. Yagci, Chunming Peng, and Gil Heo
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It is of great importance and an urgent demand to enable operational and near real-time monitoring and analysis of global agricultural drought at desirable spatial and temporal resolutions. Traditional approaches and existing systems are not able to meet the demand because of big-data and geoprocessing-modeling challenges. The latest advances in Web service, geospatial interoperability and cyberinfrastructure technologies and the availability of near real-time global remote sensing data have shown potential to address the challenges and meet the demand. This paper presents a Web service approach to building the Global Agricultural Drought Monitoring and Forecasting System (GADMFS), an open, interoperable, and on-demand geospatial Web service system, for meeting the demand. The big-data and geoprocessing modeling issues in providing complete agricultural drought information are resolved in GADMFS through improved data-, service- and system-level interoperability and servability. GADMFS is able to overcome major limitations of current drought information systems in the world and better support decision making with improved global agricultural drought data and information dissemination and analysis services.
Design and Function of the European Forest Fire Information System
Daniel McInerney, Jesus San-Miguel-Ayanz, Paolo Corti, Ceri Whitmore, Cristiano Giovando, and Andrea Camia
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The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) is a modular decision support system that monitors forest fires at a continental scale. It delivers real-time, multi-dimensional data on forest fi res to civil protection and firefighting services in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle-East. Since its inception in 2001, EFFIS has evolved into the central reference point for pan-European forest and wildfire information, and this paper describes and current applications demonstrate the state-of- the-art fi re information systems that provide data to civil protection authorities across Europe. The objective of EFFIS is to provide accurate data in order to assess and mitigate the impacts of wildfire events on society and the environment. Furthermore, EFFIS provides real-time information on critical fires, supporting decision making for international collaboration on forest fi re fighting activities. Its goal is to make these data readily available using Web-based standards and protocols.
Fast-Responder: Mobile Access to Remote Sensing for Disaster Response
Bryan G. Talbot and Lisa M. Talbot
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Fast-Responder is a data dissemination concept and research prototype designed to meet the needs of first responders to access recent remote sensing information for disaster response. It achieves fast performance by unique system trade-offs centered on a core concept called Fast-Earth, a geospatially-organized cache. Whereas traditional databases store images by collection time, requiring long searches and slow downloads, Fast-Earth subdivides the earth into small regions called plats of fixed size enabling rapid look-up and download. Recent data can be indexed rapidly in about 10 minutes/terabyte. With the mobile application, FastRspondr, Smartphone users can use a rapid Fast-Earth look-up to discover layers of data, download small chips, and flicker multiple image layers in less than a minute. Our fast rubble detection algorithm applied at the server enhances monotemporal post-event optical imagery in less than one second/ plat. We demonstrate the end-to-end system with remote sensing data from the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
A Hot Topic: The Role of the Geoweb after Wildfire
Samantha Brennan and Jon Corbett
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The potential of the Geoweb to harness public spatial knowledge is increasingly recognized. Using these technologies, the public can volunteer their locational experiences. In the case of the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park Fire, these memories need to be captured or they will soon be forgotten. Collaborating with the Kelowna Fire Museum, this paper describes the creation of an online participatory map that documents public experiences of the fire. Through a map-interface, participants contribute their own multimedia information and comment on the contributions of others. This community-based research examines an individual's willingness to volunteer their knowledge. Results examine participant engagement in terms of passive or active map use, perspectives of participants-as-experts, and broader themes of how the Geoweb can educate and preserve experiences about this event. Results demonstrate that while the mapping tool encourages users to interact with information about the fire, there are challenges in adding their own experiences.
