Remote Sensing Commons^™

Cultural Implications Of Late Quaternary Environmental Change In Northeastern Texas, Michael B. Collins, C. Britt Bousman

CRHR Research Reports

Northeastern Texas is one of the most intensely studied archaeological regions of the state, principally for the two reasons that (1) archaeologically-rich Caddoan manifestations have long attracted interest and (2) many large land-modifying projects, such as reservoirs and strip mines, have occasioned environmental studies which include investigations of cultural resources. This greater amount of activity relative to other regions in the state has generally prevailed for more than a century (Guy 1990) and prospects are good that archaeologists will continue to intensely research the area in the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, however, they will be hard-pressed to keep pace with the …

A Comprehensive Study Of The Historical Blue Sulphur Hotel Resort Through Remote Sensing, Photogrammetry, And Gis, Lora Beth Meadows

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This research examines the location of the 19th century historic Blue Sulphur hotel and sulphur springs resort located in Cabell County, West Virginia. This area has suffered degradation and modifications due to human activities. The objective of this study was to examine the location of the Blue Sulphur Springs Resort Hotel and springs, and utilize the remote sensing and GIS techniques in researching and locating structures that no longer exist or features that no longer are visible. The study integrated and utilized data from various sources and used different methods and approaches to analyze the changes to the Blue Sulphur …

St. Norbert College As Arboretum: Mapping The Trees On Campus, Jordan A. Mayer, Jason Mills, David Hunnicut

GIS Library

St. Norbert College as Arboretum: Mapping the Trees on Campus - Take a virtual tour of the trees on campus.

The tour is a multimedia ArcGIS Online story map and is available here.

Many of the trees on the St. Norbert Campus were planted by Fr. Anselm Keefe (1895- 1974) in the mid 20th century. It was Fr. Keefe’s vision to beautify the campus by creating gardens that were accessible to the public. This included planting a diverse variety of trees, including one of every tree species native to Wisconsin. It was Keefe’s mission to make St. Norbert College …

A One Year Landsat 8 Conterminous United States Study Of Cirrus And Non-Cirrus Clouds, Valeriy Kovalskyy, David P. Roy

GSCE Faculty Publications

The first year of available Landsat 8 data over the conterminous United States (CONUS), composed of 11,296 acquisitions sensed over more than 11 thousand million 30 m pixel locations, was analyzed comparing the spatial and temporal incidence of 30 m cloud and cirrus states available in the standard Landsat 8 Level 1 product suite. This comprehensive data analysis revealed that on average over a year of CONUS observations (i) 35.9% were detected with high confidence cloud, with spatio-temporal patterns similar to those observed by previous Landsat 5 and 7 cloud analyses; (ii) 28.2% were high confidence cirrus; (iii) 20.1% were …

Having It Both Ways?: Land Use Change In A U.S. Midwestern Agricultural Ecoregion, Roger Auch, Chris Laingen

Faculty Research and Creative Activity

Urbanization has been directly linked to decreases in area of agricultural lands and, as such, has been considered a threat to food security. Although the area of land used to produce food has diminished, often overlooked have been changes in agricultural output. The Eastern Corn Belt Plains (ECBP) is an important agricultural region in the U.S. Midwest. It has both gained a significant amount of urban land, primarily from the conversion of agricultural land between 1973 and 2000, and at the same time continued to produce ever-increasing quantities of agricultural products. By 2002, more corn, soybeans, and hogs were produced …

Glaciological Applications Of Terrestrial Radar Interferometry, Denis Voytenko

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Terrestrial Radar Interferometry (TRI) is a relatively new ground-based technique that combines the precision and spatial resolution of satellite interferometry with the temporal resolution of GPS. Although TRI has been applied to a variety of fields including bridge and landslide monitoring, it is ideal for studies of the highly-dynamic terminal zones of marine-terminating glaciers, some of which are known to have variable velocities related to calving and/or ocean-forced melting. My TRI instrument is the Gamma Portable Radar Interferometer, which operates at 17.2 GHz (1.74 cm wavelength), has two receiving antennas for DEM (digital elevation model) generation, and images the scenes …

Impacts Of Urban Areas On Vegetation Development Along Rural-Urban Gradients In The Upper Midwest: 2003-2012, Cole Krehbiel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Between one-third and one-half of Earth’s land surface has been directly altered by humans, with the remainder comprised of “human-dominated ecosystems” (Vitousek et al. 2008). Earth’s population has surpassed seven billion, projected to increase by 2.5 billion by 2050 in urban areas alone (United Nations 2014). The rapid urbanization of our planet drives global environmental changes in hydrosystems, biodiversity, biogeochemical cycles, land use and land cover, and climate (Grimm et al. 2008). Urban areas alter local atmospheric conditions by modifying surface albedo and consequently evapotranspiration, releasing energy through anthropogenic heat sources, and increasing atmospheric aerosols, leading to increased temperatures in …

Remote Sensing And Modeling Of Atmospheric Dust And Studying Its Impact On Environment, Weather, And Climate, Hesham El-Askary, Seon K. Park, Slobodan Nickovic, Mian Chin

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

An overview of the 2015 volume of Advances in Meteorology, which was co-edited by Chapman faculty member Dr. Hesham El-Askary.

On The Detection And Monitoring Of The Transport Of An Asian Dust Storm Using Multi-Sensor Satellite Remote Sensing, Hesham El-Askary, S. K. Park, M. H. Ahn, A. Prasad, Menas Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Dynamical and physical features of a long range transported dust event originating in China affecting Korea early March 2008 are examined using an integrative multi-sensor and multi-algorithm approach. Aerosol loadings and their size mode were analyzed over both ocean and land surfaces using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aerosol optical depth (AOD), employing standard dark target (DT) and deep blue (DB) algorithms, and the Ångström exponent (AE). Anthropogenic absorbing aerosols and smoke were found to be significant over the Indochina Peninsula, the Philippines and southern China, while a mixture of dust and pollution were predominant over central to northern …

An Analysis Of Quality For Volunteered Geographic Information, Joel C H Meier

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In recent years there has been a growing number of online user communities engaged in the creation, visualization, and use of volunteered geographic information (VGI). These data may represent an untapped resource for researchers analyzing large-area geographic phenomena such as species distributions patterns or land and resource management issues. However very few studies have used VGI for analytic research questions as little is known about the quality of these data. An understanding of the validity of VGI is a prerequisite for further exploitation of these novel data sources in research contexts. This paper looks to identify key issues related to …

Effects Of Temperature Stress On Coral Fluorescence And Reflectance, Andrea Gomez

Dissertations and Theses

Around the world, climate change, land-based pollution and fishing impacts are recognized as principal threats to coral reef ecosystems. Sea surface temperatures, in particular, are expected to change dramatically over the next decades and result in high coral mortality in some regions. Through controlled experiments, I examined changes in coral fluorescence and reflectance in response to water temperature alterations to assess the potential of employing these signatures as a diagnostic tool to measure coral health. At the NOAA Coral Culture and Collaborative Research Facility, I conducted controlled laboratory-based heat stress experiments on three Caribbean species of coral: Acropora cervicornis, Orbicella …

Determining Rockfall Volumes In Three Sites Along Habs Mountain Road In Southwestern Saudi Arabia, Using Lidar Technology, Abdullah Ayed Al-Otaibi

Masters Theses

"The rugged elevated topography is a characteristic feature of the western and southwestern regions of Saudi Arabia. Few arterial roads connect the scattered villages of these regions to major cities, such as Habs Road in Jazan region. Rock fall poses a serious hazard to people, property and animals along the rock cuts of this road. Although no traditional Rockfall studies have previously been applied to this road, accessibility and rock formation shape and structure variability influenced the choice of using Terrestrial Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) technology to calculate the volume of rockfall at selected sites along this road.

Software …

A New Technique For Modeling The Geomorphology Of A Slow Moving, Soft-Slope Landslide Using Terrestrial Lidar, Nathan Bradley Rohrbaugh

Masters Theses

"Soft slope movement is a big problem whether it involves an engineered slope, one that is near infrastructure, or both. Active landslides that fail slowly sometimes allow ample time to affect remedial works. In order to plan effective remedial works, there needs to be a model of the entire geometry of the slide. This thesis describes a new approach to evaluate the morphology of slope geometry using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data obtained from simple targets strategically positioned on a slide body. The data was gathered in three-month intervals over a period of one year to allow enough time …

Object-Based Classification Of Earthquake Damage From High-Resolution Optical Imagery Using Machine Learning, James Bialas

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Object-based approaches to the segmentation and supervised classification of remotely-sensed images yield more promising results compared to traditional pixel-based approaches. However, the development of an object-based approach presents challenges in terms of algorithm selection and parameter tuning. Subjective methods and trial and error are often used, but time consuming and yield less than optimal results. Objective methods are warranted, especially for rapid deployment in time sensitive applications such as earthquake induced damage assessment.

Our research takes a systematic approach to evaluating object-based image segmentation and machine learning algorithms for the classification of earthquake damage in remotely-sensed imagery using Trimble’s eCognition …

Assessment Of Land Cover And Riparian Zones For The Ford Research Forest - Hickey Creek/Sturgeon River And Falls River Subwatersheds, Fay Dearing

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

For landowners, knowing the contents of their land is always a primary concern. Traditional field based assessments can be challenging and expensive for large landholdings as well. However, by utilizing remote sensing and GIS models the land cover/land use and riparian areas can be more easily identified on a larger landscape level. To this end two remote sensing techniques were explored to create a land cover/land use map for the study area. The first, utilizing object-oriented techniques and high spatial resolution generated an overall accuracy of 71.97% which indicated a moderate agreement with the classified image and the field truthed …

Sparse Coding Based Dense Feature Representation Model For Hyperspectral Image Classification, Ender Oguslu, Guoqing Zhou, Zezhong Zheng, Khan Iftekharuddin, Jiang Li

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

We present a sparse coding based dense feature representation model (a preliminary version of the paper was presented at the SPIE Remote Sensing Conference, Dresden, Germany, 2013) for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. The proposed method learns a new representation for each pixel in HSI through the following four steps: sub-band construction, dictionary learning, encoding, and feature selection. The new representation usually has a very high dimensionality requiring a large amount of computational resources. We applied the l₁/l_q regularized multiclass logistic regression technique to reduce the size of the new representation. We integrated the method with a linear …

The Habitat Of European Brown Bears In Northern Spain: Mapping Habitat Fragmentation And Potential Connectivity, Alma D. Pacheco

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The European brown bear in northern Spain is considered to be an endangered species whose habitat has been fragmented into two subpopulations due to habitat loss and lack of connectivity. The importance of improving connectivity and preventing more habitat destruction is vital to recover the species in this region. This research looks at spatial and temporal variations of brown bear habitat by mapping the conditions of habitat fragmentation and potential connectivity at a regional extent. This research examines net changes of brown bear habitat fragmentation between 1990-2000, 2000-2006, and overall 1990-2006; and the degree of brown bear habitat connectivity between …