Remote Sensing Commons^™

[Introduction To] Collateral Values: The Natural Capital Created By Landscapes Of War., Todd R. Lookingbill, Peter D. Smallwood

Bookshelf

This book explores the unanticipated benefits that may arise after wars and conflicts, showing how the preservation of battlefields and the establishment of borderlands can create natural capital in the former landscapes of war. The editors call this Collateral Value, in contrast to the collateral damage that war inflicts upon infrastructure, natural capital, and human capital. The book includes case studies recounting successes and failures, opportunities and risks, and ambitious proposals.

The book is organized in two sections. The first visits U.S., English, and French battlefield sites dating from medieval England to World War I. The second explores borderlands located …

Remote Sensing Of Avalanche Paths In Glacier National Park, Montana, Morgan Voss

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Snow avalanches are the common form of mass wasting in the high mountain environments of Glacier National Park (GNP), Montana. These natural disturbances play important roles in mountain ecosystems by regularly disturbing montane systems, providing critical habitat for some species, transporting debris, and influencing vegetation and fire dynamics. Since the 1900s, natural avalanche-related activity recorded along important transportation corridors within the park has frequently disrupted transportation.

While many of the steep slopes of GNP are susceptible to avalanching, formal inventories exist only for small, critical portions of the park and they vary substantially from one another. GNP’s protected status does …

Utilization Of Various Methods And A Landsat Ndvi/Google Earth Engine Product For Classifying Irrigated Land Cover, Andrew Nemecek

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Methods for classifying irrigated land cover are often complex and not quickly reproducible. Further, moderate resolution time-series datasets have been consistently utilized to produce irrigated land cover products over the past decade, and the body of irrigation classification literature contains no examples of subclassification of irrigated land cover by irrigation method. Creation of geospatial irrigated land cover products with higher resolution datasets could improve reliability, and subclassification of irrigation by method could provide better information for hydrologists and climatologists attempting to model the role of irrigation in the surface-ground water cycle and the water-energy balance. This study summarizes a simple, …

Object-Based Supervised Machine Learning Regional-Scale Land-Cover Classification Using High Resolution Remotely Sensed Data, Christopher A. Ramezan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

High spatial resolution (HR) (1m – 5m) remotely sensed data in conjunction with supervised machine learning classification are commonly used to construct land-cover classifications. Despite the increasing availability of HR data, most studies investigating HR remotely sensed data and associated classification methods employ relatively small study areas. This work therefore drew on a 2,609 km2, regional-scale study in northeastern West Virginia, USA, to investigates a number of core aspects of HR land-cover supervised classification using machine learning. Issues explored include training sample selection, cross-validation parameter tuning, the choice of machine learning algorithm, training sample set size, and feature selection. A …

Coupling Between Land–Ocean–Atmosphere And Pronounced Changes In Atmospheric/Meteorological Parameters Associated With The Hudhud Cyclone Of October 2014, Akshansa Chauhan, Rajesh Kumar, Ramesh P. Singh

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

India is vulnerable to all kinds of natural hazards associated with land, ocean, biosphere, atmosphere, and snow/glaciers. These natural hazards impact large areas and the population living in the affected regions. India is surrounded by ocean on three sides and is vulnerable to cyclonic activities. Every year cyclones hit the east and west coasts of India, affecting the population living along the coasts and infrastructure and inland areas. The extent of the affected inland areas depends on the intensity of the cyclone. On 12 October 2014, a strong cyclone “Hudhud” hit the east coast of India that caused a high …

Land Use And Land Cover Changes, And Environment And Risk Evaluation Of Dujiangyan City (Sw China) Using Remote Sensing And Gis Techniques, Biswajit Nath, Zheng Niu, Ramesh P. Singh

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Understanding of the Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) change, its transitions and Landscape risk (LR) evaluation in earthquake-affected areas is important for planning and urban sustainability. In the present study, we have considered Dujiangyan City and its Environs (DCEN), a seismic-prone area close to the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake (8.0 Mw) during 2007–2018. Five different multi-temporal data sets for the years 2007, 2008, 2010, 2015, and 2018 were considered for LULC mapping, followed by the maximum likelihood supervised classification technique. The individual LULC maps were further used in four time periods, i.e., 2007–2018, 2008–2018, 2010–2018, and 2015–2018, to evaluate the …

Analysis Of Land Surface Temperature Over Urban Landcover Types Using Satellite Remote Sensing And Ground-Based Applications, Makini Valentine, Justine Ginchereau

Publications and Research

Urban areas have discrete differences in their land surface temperatures (LST) compared to rural areas. These regions are covered with impermeable materials with less vegetation and moisture. Consequently, this phenomenon causes major thermal intensities of different land surfaces, negatively impact people and environment. The objective of this project is to examine and to compare land surface temperature obtained from in-situ data and satellite-based observations in order to understand the diurnal variation and heat transfer at each surface type. The study utilizes series of hand held thermal infrared cameras and one Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) infrared camera to find land surface …

Decadal Land Surface Phenology And Water Quality In The Headwaters Illinois River Watershed, Justin Ray Rollans

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over 25 percent of the world’s population either lives on or obtains water from karst aquifers. The complex interactions between subsurface karst geologic features, the constant motion of the plant life cycle, and significant water resource demand all suggest the need to better define those interactions. The relationship of historical land surface phenology and water quality in karst topography were investigated in the Headwaters Illinois River watershed in Northwest Arkansas (NWA). This area represents high vulnerability to surface water and groundwater contamination, with both natural and anthropogenic processes such as over application of broil litter for enhanced cattle browse, affecting …

Investigating Smoke Aerosol Emission Coefficients Using Modis Active Fire And Aerosol Products – A Case Study In The Conus And Indonesia, Xiaoman Lu, Xiaoyang Zhang, Fangjun Li, Mark Cochrane

Global Land Surface Season Data Sets

This data set is in relation to the paper of the same title, which has been submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences.

Instructions for viewing the data in “Readme.txt”

Spatio-Temporal Reconstruction Of Remote Sensing Observations, Kamrul Khan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The USDA Forest Service aims to use satellite imagery for monitoring and predicting changes in forest conditions over time within the country. We specifically focus on a 230, 400 hectares region in north-central Wisconsin between 2003 - 2012. The auxiliary data collected from the satellite imagery of this region are relatively dense in space and time and can be used to efficiently predict how the forest condition changed over that decade. However, these records have a significant proportion of missing values due to weather conditions and system failures. To fill in these missing values, we build spaciotemporal models based on …

Earth-Observation-Based Estimation And Forecasting Of Particulate Matter Impact On Solar Energy In Egypt, Panagiotis G. Kosmopoulos, Stelios Kazadzis, Hesham El-Askary, Michael Taylor, Antonis Gkikas, Emmanouil Proestakis, Charalampos Kontoes, Mohamed Mostafa El-Khayat

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

This study estimates the impact of dust aerosols on surface solar radiation and solar energy in Egypt based on Earth Observation (EO) related techniques. For this purpose, we exploited the synergy of monthly mean and daily post processed satellite remote sensing observations from theMODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), radiative transfer model (RTM) simulations utilizing machine learning, in conjunction with 1-day forecasts from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). As cloudy conditions in this region are rare, aerosols in particular dust, are the most common sources of solar irradiance attenuation, causing performance issues in the photovoltaic (PV) and concentrated solar power …

Oil Spills Detection By Means Of Uas And Low-Cost Airborne Thermal Sensors, A. Al-Shammari, Eugene Levin, R. Shults

School of Technology Publications

This paper provides an overview of oil spill scenarios and the remote sensing methods used for detection and mapping the spills. It also discusses the different kinds of thermal sensors used in oil spills detection. As UAS is becoming an important player in the oil and gas industry for the low operating costs involved, this research involved working with a cheap thermal airborne sensor mounted on DJI Phantom 4 system. Data were collected in two scenarios, first scenario is collecting data in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula at a petroleum company location and the second scenario was an indoor experiment simulating an …

Evaluation Of Spatial Generalization Characteristics Of A Robust Classifier As Applied To Coral Reef Habitats In Remote Islands Of The Pacific Ocean, Justin J. Gapper, Hesham El-Askary, Erik J. Linstead, Thomas Piechota

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

This study was an evaluation of the spectral signature generalization properties of coral across four remote Pacific Ocean reefs. The sites under consideration have not been the subject of previous studies for coral classification using remote sensing data. Previous research regarding using remote sensing to identify reefs has been limited to in-situ assessment, with some researchers also performing temporal analysis of a selected area of interest. This study expanded the previous in-situ analyses by evaluating the ability of a basic predictor, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), trained on Depth Invariant Indices calculated from the spectral signature of coral in one location …

Elevation And Azimuth-Aided Channel Estimation Scheme For Airborne Hyperspectral Data Transmission, Vahid Vahidi, Ebrahim Saberinia

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

A channel-estimation (CE) scheme is proposed to estimate the complex amplitude, Doppler shift, angle-of-departure, and angle-of-arrival of the channel taps for sparse and doubly selective channels for hyperspectral image transmission from unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) to ground stations. The proposed method is dubbed as compressed-sensing joint parameter estimation (CS-JPE) and finds the channel parameters matrix by employing a compressed-sensing (CS)-based method. Afterward, a modified version of the joint parameter estimation (JPE) is proposed as CS-JPE and is dubbed as M-CS-JPE, which employs the elevation-azimuth angles of the line-of-sight channel tap to estimate the channel parameters with higher accuracy and lower …

Finding Ft. Smith And Ft. Star In Smithland, Ky, Austin Valentine, Austin Valentine Jr.

Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Through the utilization of Light Detection and Ranging data, one can compile 3-dimensional models that can be used to spot anomalies of historical interest. These anomalies, if recognizable by the trained eye, can then be used to geo-reference historic maps to gain a better understanding of historic sites as well as to reveal possible areas of interests or unknown features.

By using a 3-dimensional model compiled by LiDAR data, I was able to geo-reference a December 13^th, 1861 map of the Civil War defenses for the town of Smithland, Kentucky. Through this process, I have been able to …

Scaling Effect Of Fused Aster-Modis Land Surface Temperature In An Urban Environment, Hua Liu, Qihao Weng

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

There is limited research in land surface temperatures (LST) simulation using image fusion techniques, especially studies addressing the downscaling effect of LST image fusion. LST simulation and associated downscaling effect can potentially benefit the thermal studies requiring both high spatial and temporal resolutions. This study simulated LSTs based on observed Terra Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) and Terra Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) LST imagery with Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model, and investigated the downscaling effect of LST image fusion at 15, 30, 60, 90, 120, 250, 500, and 1000 m spatial resolutions. The study …

A Comparative Analysis Of Non-Invasive Exploration Techniques Lidar Vs. Aerial Photography – Kincaid Mounds Archaeological Site, Austin Valentine, Austin Valentine Jr.

Student Scholarship & Creative Works

KINCAID MOUNDS - A Comparative Analysis of Non-invasive Exploration Techniques is a journal of my efforts to conduct non-invasive site investigations at the Kincaid Mounds Archaeological site in Southern Illinois. Through the utilization of tools such as; drones, photography, satellite imaging, light distance and ranging, and powerful analysis software, I will demonstrate a number of useful techniques which one can utilize to conduct independent site investigations without disturbing a sites landscape or structural integrity. Thus, illustrating differences between those techniques and pointing out their strengths and weaknesses in their various applications.

During this journey, I will also venture into the …

Uas-Based Remote Sensing For Weed Identification And Cover Crop Termination Determination, Shailaja Vemula

Student Theses and Dissertations

This project aimed at demonstrating the utility of using unmanned aerial system (UAS) based remote sensing to assess percentage weed coverage and cash crop vegetative coverage development corresponding to cover crop (cereal rye) termination at different growth stages. A UAS equipped with an RGB (visible bands) camera was used to acquire aerial imagery of cover crop integrated soybean plots. The specific objectives were: 1) to discriminate crop and weed vegetation based on (a) spectral information and (b) location relative to the crop rows; (2) to verify optimum timing for cover crop termination using vegetative cover development based on visible spectroscopy …

A Field Guide For Weathering: Embodied Tactics For Collectives Of Two Or More Humans, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Astrida Neimanis

The Goose

In our inherited meteorological practices and frameworks, weather conditions are managed for us in a range of ways (for example, through architecture, technology, commodity culture, infrastructure, economic rationale). This field guide brings the weather back to the body. A traditional field guide provides tools for the individual sovereign human subject to observe and document nature “over there”. In contrast, through a range of different activities, our field guide not only invites investigation and cataloguing of the field that we also comprise, but also challenges what counts as a noteworthy observation regarding the weather and also climate.

Survey And Insights Into Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Detection And Documentation Of Clandestine Graves And Human Remains, Bryce Murray, Derek T. Anderson, Daniel J. Wescott, Robert Moorhead, Melissa F. Anderson

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

Numerous biological and archaeological studies have demonstrated the legitimacy of remote sensing in anthropology. Herein, focus is placed on detecting and documenting terrestrial clandestine graves and surface remains (CGSR) of humans using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), sensors and automatic processing algorithms. CGSR is a complex decision making under uncertainty problem that requires the identification and intelligent reasoning about direct evidence of human remains and their environmental fingerprints. As such, it is as much an engineering and geospatial problem as it is an anthropology problem. This article is a cross- disciplinary effort to survey existing work across disciplines and to provide …