Managing the knowledge created by the users trough Geospatial User Feedback system. The NEXTGEOSS use case

Author(s):  
Alaitz Zabala Torres ◽  
Joan Masó Pau ◽  
Xavier Pons

<p>First approach to metadata was based on producer's point of view, since producers were responsible for documenting and sharing metadata about their products. Since 2012 (started in EU FP7 GeoViQua project), the Geospatial User Feedback approach described the user perspective on datasets/services (GUF, OGC standard in 2016). In the past users of the data gained knowledge about and with the data, but they lacked the means to easily and automatically share this knowledge in a formal way.</p><p>In the EU H2020 NextGEOSS project, the NiMMbus system has been matured as an interoperable solution to manage and store feedback items following the OGC GUF standard. NiMMbus can be used as a component for any geospatial portal, and, so far, has been integrated in several H2020 project catalogues or portals (NextGEOSS, ECOPotential, GeoEssential and GroundTruth2.0).</p><p>User feedback metadata complements producer's metadata and adds value to the resource description in a geospatial portal by collecting the knowledge gained by the user while using the data for the purpose originally foreseen by the producer or an innovative one.</p><p>The current GEOSS platform provide access to endless data resources. But to truly assist decision making, GEOSS wants to add a knowledge base. We believe that the NiMMbus system is a significant NextGEOSS contribution is this direction.</p><p>This communication describes how to extend the GUF to provide a set of knowledge elements and connect them to the original data creating a network of knowledge. They can be citations (publications and policy briefs), quality indications (QualityML vocabulary and ISO 19157), usage reports (code and analytical processes), etc. The NiMMbus offers tools to create different levels of feedback starting with comments, providing citations or extract quality indicators for the different quality classes (positional, temporal and attribute accuracy, completeness, consistency) and share them to other users as part of the user feedback and usage report. Usage reports in GUF standards can be extended to include code fragments that other users can apply to reproduce a previous usage. For example, in ECOPotential Protected Areas from Space map browser (continues on H2020 e-Shape project) a vegetation index optimum to observe phenological blooms can be encoded by a user in the layer calculation using a combination of original Sentinel-2 bands. The portal stores that in a JavaScript code (serialized as JSON) that describes which layers and formula were used. Once a user validated the new layer, can decide to make it available to everyone by publishing it as an open source JavaScript code in the NiMMbus system. From then on, any other user of the portal can import it and use it. As the usage description is a full feedback item, the user creating the dynamic layer can also describe any other related information such as comments or advertise a related publication.</p><p>The system moves the focus to sharing user of the data and complements the producers documentation with the richness of the knowledge that user gain in their data driven research. In addition to augment GEOSS data the system enables a social network of knowledge.</p>

2015 ◽  
pp. 26-37
Author(s):  
V. B. Golub ◽  
V. V. Bondareva ◽  
A. N. Sorokin ◽  
L. F. Nikolaychuk

Plant communities with reed domination (Phragmites australis agg.) occupy the large areas in the Lower Volga Valley and especially in the river delta. We have set the task to reveal the diversity of these communities in the Lower Volga Valley. For this purpose, we applied the database that is registered in the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD) under the EU-RU–002 index (http://www.givd.info/) and includes 14871 relevés made during the period from 1924 to 2013. Communities with the dominance of reed were defined as such, if the coverage of this plant was more than 50 %. We have found 375 such relevés in the database. At first, one basal community, 3 associations and 3 subassociations with domination of Phragmites australis agg. were distinguished in the Lower Volga Valley. All processing and analysis of relevés were performed using the software package JUICE 7.0. (Tichý, 2002). The «Cocktail» method was applied to establish the sociological groups that indicate environmental conditions (Bruelheide, 2000). The expert system for selection from the database of relevés by means of these groups was created. It is allowed us to ascribe relevés to earlier distinguished associations, subassociations and basal community. 171 relevés have been identified by the expert system and they were assigned to association, subassociation or the basal community. 204 relevés were not referred to any association, subassociation or the basal community. We wanted to answer the question: are there among these 204 relevés, which could be interpreted as the new syntaxa, giving them the proper ecological characteristics? For this purpose, the cluster analysis of 204 relevés has been carried out. The optimal level of clustering was determined by calculating the index of “crispness of classification” (Botta-Dukát et al., 2005). The greatest “crispness of classification” was reached at allocation of 13 clusters. Consideration of the floristic composition of allocated groups had shown that 11 of them were the transitional plant communities among the earlier established syntaxa. Only two clusters were differed in rather original structure that we could explain by the influence of environment factors. We have identified them as new associations Rubio tataricae-Phragmitetum australis and Cynancho acuti-Phragmitetum australis. All associations with the dominance of Phragmites australis agg. distinguished in the Lower Volga Valley were included in the alliance Phragmition communis Koch 1926, order Phragmitetalia communis Koch 1926. In literary sources from the ecological point of view these syntaxa are defined as the wetland communities, which are closely linked to water bodies (Šumberová et al., 2011; Ermakov, 2012). However, in many cases this definition does not correspond to the ecology of plant communities with the dominance of reed in the lower reaches of the Volga River. Ecotops of these communities are flooded for up to 2–3 months in a year and then they dry out. In the autumn, the ground water level can drop to a depth of one meter (Golub et al., 2011). The plant satellites of the reed here are often mesophytic plants such as Rubus caesius, Calamagrostis epigeios, Phalaris arundinacea, Rubia tatarica, Althaea officinalis, and Rumex stenophyllus. Therefore, the inclusion of phytocoenosises with domination of the reed in the lower reaches of the Volga River in the alliance Phragmition communis is rather relative. A correct placement of these plant communities in the system of vegetation syntaxa of the arid areas can be made only if it is based on original data obtained from much bigger territory than the Lower Volga Valley. In future geobotanical studies, it is desirable to divide the aggregation of Phragmites australis agg. into smaller species taxa.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Ewa Kaczan-Winiarska

The Austrian government is extremely sceptical about the accession negotiations which are conducted by the European Commission on behalf of the European Union with Turkey and calls for the negotiation process to end. Serious reservations of Vienna have been raised by the current political situation in Turkey under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as well as by the standards of democracy in Turkey, which differ greatly from European standards. Serious deficiencies in rule of law, freedom of speech and independence of the judiciary, confirmed in the latest European Commission report on Turkey, do not justify, from Vienna’s point of view, the continuation of talks with Ankara on EU membership. In fact, Austria’s scepticism about the European perspective for Turkey has a longer tradition. This was marked previously in 2005 when the accession negotiations began. Until now, Austria’s position has not had enough clout within the European arena. Pragmatic cooperation with Turkey as a strategic partner of the EU, both in the context of the migration crisis and security policy, proved to be a key factor. The question is whether Austria, which took over the EU presidency from 1.7.2018, will be able to more strongly accentuate its reservations about Turkey and even build an alliance of Member States strong enough to block Turkey’s accession process.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 251
Author(s):  
Christina Ludwig ◽  
Robert Hecht ◽  
Sven Lautenbach ◽  
Martin Schorcht ◽  
Alexander Zipf

Public urban green spaces are important for the urban quality of life. Still, comprehensive open data sets on urban green spaces are not available for most cities. As open and globally available data sets, the potential of Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap (OSM) data for urban green space mapping is high but limited due to their respective uncertainties. Sentinel-2 imagery cannot distinguish public from private green spaces and its spatial resolution of 10 m fails to capture fine-grained urban structures, while in OSM green spaces are not mapped consistently and with the same level of completeness everywhere. To address these limitations, we propose to fuse these data sets under explicit consideration of their uncertainties. The Sentinel-2 derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index was fused with OSM data using the Dempster–Shafer theory to enhance the detection of small vegetated areas. The distinction between public and private green spaces was achieved using a Bayesian hierarchical model and OSM data. The analysis was performed based on land use parcels derived from OSM data and tested for the city of Dresden, Germany. The overall accuracy of the final map of public urban green spaces was 95% and was mainly influenced by the uncertainty of the public accessibility model.


Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 1486
Author(s):  
Chris Cavalaris ◽  
Sofia Megoudi ◽  
Maria Maxouri ◽  
Konstantinos Anatolitis ◽  
Marios Sifakis ◽  
...  

In this study, a modelling approach for the estimation/prediction of wheat yield based on Sentinel-2 data is presented. Model development was accomplished through a two-step process: firstly, the capacity of Sentinel-2 vegetation indices (VIs) to follow plant ecophysiological parameters was established through measurements in a pilot field and secondly, the results of the first step were extended/evaluated in 31 fields, during two growing periods, to increase the applicability range and robustness of the models. Modelling results were examined against yield data collected by a combine harvester equipped with a yield-monitoring system. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) were examined as plant signals and combined with Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and/or Normalized Multiband Drought Index (NMDI) during the growth period or before sowing, as water and soil signals, respectively. The best performing model involved the EVI integral for the 20 April–31 May period as a plant signal and NMDI on 29 April and before sowing as water and soil signals, respectively (R2 = 0.629, RMSE = 538). However, model versions with a single date and maximum seasonal VIs values as a plant signal, performed almost equally well. Since the maximum seasonal VIs values occurred during the last ten days of April, these model versions are suitable for yield prediction.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (17) ◽  
pp. 2760
Author(s):  
Gourav Misra ◽  
Fiona Cawkwell ◽  
Astrid Wingler

Remote sensing of plant phenology as an indicator of climate change and for mapping land cover has received significant scientific interest in the past two decades. The advancing of spring events, the lengthening of the growing season, the shifting of tree lines, the decreasing sensitivity to warming and the uniformity of spring across elevations are a few of the important indicators of trends in phenology. The Sentinel-2 satellite sensors launched in June 2015 (A) and March 2017 (B), with their high temporal frequency and spatial resolution for improved land mapping missions, have contributed significantly to knowledge on vegetation over the last three years. However, despite the additional red-edge and short wave infra-red (SWIR) bands available on the Sentinel-2 multispectral instruments, with improved vegetation species detection capabilities, there has been very little research on their efficacy to track vegetation cover and its phenology. For example, out of approximately every four papers that analyse normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) or enhanced vegetation index (EVI) derived from Sentinel-2 imagery, only one mentions either SWIR or the red-edge bands. Despite the short duration that the Sentinel-2 platforms have been operational, they have proved their potential in a wide range of phenological studies of crops, forests, natural grasslands, and other vegetated areas, and in particular through fusion of the data with those from other sensors, e.g., Sentinel-1, Landsat and MODIS. This review paper discusses the current state of vegetation phenology studies based on the first five years of Sentinel-2, their advantages, limitations, and the scope for future developments.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 956
Author(s):  
Florian Mouret ◽  
Mohanad Albughdadi ◽  
Sylvie Duthoit ◽  
Denis Kouamé ◽  
Guillaume Rieu ◽  
...  

This paper studies the detection of anomalous crop development at the parcel-level based on an unsupervised outlier detection technique. The experimental validation is conducted on rapeseed and wheat parcels located in Beauce (France). The proposed methodology consists of four sequential steps: (1) preprocessing of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and multispectral images acquired using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites, (2) extraction of SAR and multispectral pixel-level features, (3) computation of parcel-level features using zonal statistics and (4) outlier detection. The different types of anomalies that can affect the studied crops are analyzed and described. The different factors that can influence the outlier detection results are investigated with a particular attention devoted to the synergy between Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data. Overall, the best performance is obtained when using jointly a selection of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 features with the isolation forest algorithm. The selected features are co-polarized (VV) and cross-polarized (VH) backscattering coefficients for Sentinel-1 and five Vegetation Indexes for Sentinel-2 (among us, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and two variants of the Normalized Difference Water). When using these features with an outlier ratio of 10%, the percentage of detected true positives (i.e., crop anomalies) is equal to 94.1% for rapeseed parcels and 95.5% for wheat parcels.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 505
Author(s):  
Gregoriy Kaplan ◽  
Offer Rozenstein

Satellite remote sensing is a useful tool for estimating crop variables, particularly Leaf Area Index (LAI), which plays a pivotal role in monitoring crop development. The goal of this study was to identify the optimal Sentinel-2 bands for LAI estimation and to derive Vegetation Indices (VI) that are well correlated with LAI. Linear regression models between time series of Sentinel-2 imagery and field-measured LAI showed that Sentinel-2 Band-8A—Narrow Near InfraRed (NIR) is more accurate for LAI estimation than the traditionally used Band-8 (NIR). Band-5 (Red edge-1) showed the lowest performance out of all red edge bands in tomato and cotton. A novel finding was that Band 9 (Water vapor) showed a very high correlation with LAI. Bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, and 12 were saturated at LAI ≈ 3 in cotton and tomato. Bands 6, 7, 8, 8A, and 9 were not saturated at high LAI values in cotton and tomato. The tomato, cotton, and wheat LAI estimation performance of ReNDVI (R2 = 0.79, 0.98, 0.83, respectively) and two new VIs (WEVI (Water vapor red Edge Vegetation Index) (R2 = 0.81, 0.96, 0.71, respectively) and WNEVI (Water vapor narrow NIR red Edge Vegetation index) (R2 = 0.79, 0.98, 0.79, respectively)) were higher than the LAI estimation performance of the commonly used NDVI (R2 = 0.66, 0.83, 0.05, respectively) and other common VIs tested in this study. Consequently, reNDVI, WEVI, and WNEVI can facilitate more accurate agricultural monitoring than traditional VIs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Ángel Aguilar ◽  
Rafael Jiménez-Lao ◽  
Abderrahim Nemmaoui ◽  
Fernando José Aguilar ◽  
Dilek Koc-San ◽  
...  

Remote sensing techniques based on medium resolution satellite imagery are being widely applied for mapping plastic covered greenhouses (PCG). This article aims at testing the spectral consistency of surface reflectance values of Sentinel-2 MSI (S2 L2A) and Landsat 8 OLI (L8 L2 and the pansharpened and atmospherically corrected product from L1T product; L8 PANSH) data in PCG areas located in Spain, Morocco, Italy and Turkey. The six corresponding bands of S2 and L8, together with the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), were generated through an OBIA approach for each PCG study site. The coefficient of determination (r2) and the root mean square error (RMSE) were computed in sixteen cloud-free simultaneously acquired image pairs from the four study sites to evaluate the coherence between the two sensors. It was found that the S2 and L8 correlation (r2 > 0.840, RMSE < 9.917%) was quite good in most bands and NDVI. However, the correlation of the two sensors fluctuated between study sites, showing occasional sun glint effects on PCG roofs related to the sensor orbit and sun position. Moreover, higher surface reflectance discrepancies between L8 L2 and L8 PANSH data, mainly in the visible bands, were always observed in areas with high-level aerosol values derived from the aerosol quality band included in the L8 L2 product (SR aerosol). In this way, the consistency between L8 PANSH and S2 L2A was improved mainly in high-level aerosol areas according to the SR aerosol band.


Management ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 473-487
Author(s):  
Andrzej Czyżewski ◽  
Sebastian Stępień

Summary The objective of the paper is to present the results of negotiations on the EU budget for 2014-2020, with particular emphasis on the Common Agricultural Policy. Authors indicate the steps for establishing the budget, from the proposal of the European Commission presented in 2011, ending with the draft of UE budget agreed at the meeting of the European Council on February 2013 and the meeting of the AGRIFISH on March 2013 and then approved by the political agreement of the European Commission, European Parliament and European Council on June 2013. In this context, there will be an assessment of the new budget from the point of view of Polish economy and agriculture.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 1509
Author(s):  
Roxana Voicu-Dorobanțu ◽  
Clara Volintiru ◽  
Maria-Floriana Popescu ◽  
Vlad Nerău ◽  
George Ștefan

The process of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 and cutting CO2 emissions by 2030 by 55% compared to 1990 as per the EU Green Deal is highly complex. The energy mix must be changed to ensure long-term environmental sustainability, mainly by closing down coal sites, while preserving the energy-intensive short-term economic growth, ensuring social equity, and opening opportunities for regions diminishing in population and potential. Romania is currently in the position of deciding the optimal way forward in this challenging societal shift while morphing to evidence-based policy-making and anticipatory governance, mainly in its two coal-mining regions. This article provides possible future scenarios for tackling this complex issue in Romania through a three-pronged, staggered, methodology: (1) clustering Romania with other similar countries from the point of view of the Just Transition efforts (i.e., the energy mix and the socio-economic parameters), (2) analyzing Romania’s potential evolution of the energy mix from the point of the thermal efficiency of two major power plants (CEH and CEO) and the systemic energy losses, and (3) providing insights on the socio-economic context (economic development and labor market transformations, including the component on the effects on vulnerable consumers) of the central coal regions in Romania.


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