1,721,003 research outputs found
Irrigated Crop Types Mapping in Tashkent Province of Uzbekistan with Remote Sensing-Based Classification Methods
Appropriate crop type mapping to monitor and control land management is very important in developing countries. It can be very useful where digital cadaster maps are not available or usage of Remote Sensing (RS) data is not utilized in the process of monitoring and inventory. The main goal of the present research is to compare and assess the importance of optical RS data in crop type classification using medium and high spatial resolution RS imagery in 2018. With this goal, Landsat 8 (L8) and Sentinel-2 (S2) data were acquired over the Tashkent Province between the crop growth period of May and October. In addition, this period is the only possible time for having cloud-free satellite images. The following four indices “Normalized Difference Vegetation Index” (NDVI), “Enhanced Vegetation Index” (EVI), and “Normalized Difference Water Index” (NDWI1 and NDWI2) were calculated using blue, red, near-infrared, shortwave infrared 1, and shortwave infrared 2 bands. Support-Vector-Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) classification methods were used to generate the main crop type maps. As a result, the Overall Accuracy (OA) of all indices was above 84% and the highest OA of 92% was achieved together with EVI-NDVI and the RF method of L8 sensor data. The highest Kappa Accuracy (KA) was found with the RF method of L8 data when EVI (KA of 88%) and EVI-NDVI (KA of 87%) indices were used. A comparison of the classified crop type area with Official State Statistics (OSS) data about sown crops area demonstrated that the smallest absolute weighted average (WA) value difference (0.2 thousand ha) was obtained using EVI-NDVI with RF method and NDVI with SVM method of L8 sensor data. For S2-sensor data, the smallest absolute value difference result (0.1 thousand ha) was obtained using EVI with RF method and 0.4 thousand ha using NDVI with SVM method. Therefore, it can be concluded that the results demonstrate new opportunities in the joint use of Landsat and Sentinel data in the future to capture high temporal resolution during the vegetation growth period for crop type mapping. We believe that the joint use of S2 and L8 data enables the separation of crop types and increases the classification accuracy
Spatio-Temporal Grassland Development in Inner Mongolia after Implementation of the First Comprehensive Nation-Wide Grassland Conservation Program
Protection of the grassland’s ecological environment and improvement of people’s livelihoods are major tasks for the management of pastoral areas in Inner Mongolia. The comprehensive program for grassland conservation in China, the Subsidy and Incentive System for Grassland Conservation (SISGC), was launched in 2011. To comprehend the effects of this major step towards sustainable grassland development, this study focuses on the spatio-temporal development of grasslands in Inner Mongolia since 2011. Through the combination of MODIS (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite data with up to date meteorological data, we used the indicators of Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) and Net Primary Productivity (NPP) to analyze qualitative and quantitative grassland changes. A classification system on the pixel level, reflecting change trends and fluctuations of both FVC and NPP, was applied to monitor and analyze the grassland development from 2011 to 2019. In particular, the spatial transfer matrix of the recent two years (2018 to 2019) was analyzed to reveal the latest potential issues and random impact factors. The results show a positive overall but spatially unbalanced effect of SISGC, with a prominent positive impact in the semi-desert grassland area. The potential threats from both social and natural aspects as well as the importance of a forecast system for local stakeholders in the pastoral area are discussed
Benefits and Constraints of the Agricultural Land Acquisition for Urbanization for Household Gender Equality in Affected Rural Communes: A Case Study in Huong Thuy Town, Thua Thien Hue Province, Vietnam
The Vietnamese Government has implemented agricultural land acquisition for urbanization (ALAFU) since 2010 which has caused a high level of social-economic transition in the country. In this paper, we applied the gender and development approach to discover how ALAFU has influenced the household gender equality in affected areas in Thua Thien Hue province, Vietnam. The data for this paper was mainly collected from two household group surveys, four group discussions, and six key informant interviews. Group 1 covers 50 affected households whose agricultural land was acquired for urbanization, while Group 2 consists of 50 households whose agricultural land was not taken away. The findings reveal that ALAFU has led to reduced access to agricultural land for group 1, but has contributed to an increase of economic status for women in both groups by creating non-farming job opportunities with a good income. However, most of their new jobs are still informal, contain potential risks, and the unpaid care work burden is heavy. Moreover, although the rate of women participating in household decision making has increased, the quality of participation is limited. Their participation in social activities and vocational training courses has improved insignificantly. Therefore, if the Government continues to promote ALAFU, they should take structural gender inequalities into account to achieve their sustainable development goals
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Assessing the Drought Variability in Northeast China over Multiple Temporal and Spatial Scales
Long-term drought variation provides a scientific foundation for water resource planning and drought mitigation. However, the spatiotemporal variation characteristics of drought in northeast China (NEC) are unclear. We conducted a comprehensive assessment of drought status and trends based on the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) in NEC from 1990 until 2018. The findings show that: (1) the drying trend peaked in 2001, and then exhibited a mitigation tendency before drying again after 2013. The implementation of ecological restoration projects is primarily responsible for drought mitigation. (2) The areas with wetting and drying trends in the future would cover 86% and 17% of NEC, respectively. (3) There is a time lag between improved vegetation and the trend shift from dry to wet. (4) Spring and winter revealed wet trends within 71% and 84% of NEC, respectively, showing high sensitivity and resilience to drought, while 92–93% of NEC displayed dry tendencies during the summer and autumn seasons. The drought-affected area was the highest in summer and lowest in autumn. (5) The interannual drought severity was highest in May and June. (6) The highest drought impacts and trends occur within shrub and grass and sparsely vegetated land, as well as middle-temperate semiarid regions (M-semiarid). (7) The warmer the temperature zone, the more sensitive it is towards drought under the same hydrological conditions, showing a high drought-affected area. The drier the land, the higher the drought-affected area within the same temperature zone, with pronounced drought trends during the spring and summer seasons. Our findings highlight the need for the government to more explicitly develop drought mitigation strategies in accordance with NEC’s spatiotemporal drought variations and specifically the need to concentrate on droughts in M-semiarid regions occurring in summer, particularly in May and June
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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