Publications

Geographic information systems (GIS) are increasingly being used in environmental impact assessments (EIA) because GIS is useful for analysing spatial impacts of various development scenarios. Spatially representing these impacts provides another tool for landscape ecology in environmental and geographical investigations by facilitating analysis of the effects of landscape patterns on...

Satellite-derived vegetation indices extracted over locations representative of midwestern U.S. cropland and forest for the period 1990–94 are analyzed to determine the sensitivity of the indices to neutron probe soil moisture measurements of the Illinois Climate Network (ICN). The deseasoned (i.e., departures from multiyear mean annual cycle) soil moisture measurements are shown to be...

The support vector machine (SVM) is a group of theoretically superior machine learning algorithms. It was found competitive with the best available machine learning algorithms in classifying high-dimensional data sets. This paper gives an introduction to the theoretical development of the SVM and an experimental evaluation of its accuracy, stability and training speed in deriving land...

We used interferometric methods on a pair of repeat-pass ERS-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images to study soil moisture changes over sparsely vegetated targets. The intensity of the SAR image acquired at one time was higher than that of an image acquired at an earlier time. We used a correlation image computed from the SAR image pair to study the cause of the observed changes in SAR...

Multitemporal satellite image datasets provide valuable information on the phenological characteristics of vegetation, thereby significantly increasing the accuracy of cover type classifications compared to single date classifications. However, the processing of these datasets can become very complex when dealing with multitemporal data combined with multispectral data. Advanced Very...

The U.S. Geological Survey EROS Data Center archives, processes, and disseminates Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) data products. The ASTER instrument is one of five sensors onboard the Earth Observing System's Terra satellite launched December 18, 1999. ASTER collects broad spectral coverage with high spatial resolution at near infrared, shortwave...

Rainfall monitoring is a regular activity of food security analysts for sub-Saharan Africa due to the potentially disastrous impact of drought. Crop water accounting schemes are used to track rainfall timing and amounts relative to phenological requirements, to infer water limitation impacts on yield. Unfortunately, many rain gauge reports are available only after significant delays, and...

Pilot reports in January 1995 and geologic field observations from the summer of 1996 indicate that a relatively small explosive eruption of Makushin, one of the more frequently active volcanoes in the Aleutian arc of Alaska, occurred on 30 January 1995. Several independent radar interferograms that each span the time period from October 1993 to September 1995 show evidence of ???7 cm of...

Continuous GPS measurements from Colima, Mexico during 4/93-6/01, bracketing the Oct. 9, 1995 M = 8.0 Colima-Jalisco earthquake, provide new constraints on Rivera plate subduction mechanics. Modeling of margin-normal strain accumulation before the earthquake suggests the Rivera-North America subduction interface was fully locked. Transient postseismic motion from 10/ 95-6/97 is well fit...

No abstract available.

Forest cover is of great interest to a variety of scientific and land management applications, many of which require not only information on forest categories, but also tree canopy density. In previous studies, large area tree canopy density had been estimated at spatial resolutions of 1km or coarser using coarse resolution satellite images. In this study, a strategy is developed for...

Cover type use by white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus dacotensis) in the central Black Hills of South Dakota was compared to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service digital data using a Geographic Information System (GIS). Cover types were determined from observations of radiocollared deer and random locations and from corresponding point locations in the...