Distribution of snow water equivalence (SWE) was measured in the Emerald Lake watershed located in Sequoia National Park, California, by taking hundreds of depth measurements and density profiles at six locations during the 1986, 1987 and 1988 water years. A stratified sampling scheme was evaluated by identifying and mapping zones of similar snow properties on the basis of topographic parameter...

The use of biodiversity surrogates has been discussed in the context of designing habitat linkages to support the migration of species affected by climate change. Topography has been proposed as a useful surrogate in the coarse-filter approach, as the hydrological process caused by topography such as erosion and accumulation is the basis of ecological processes. However, some studies that have ...

A key problem in the use of physically based models of landslide hazards is how to parameterize the representation of soil properties. We applied a physically based model for the topographic control on shallow landsliding (SHALSTAB) to two catchments in Rio de Janeiro to investigate the accuracy of model results in relation to parameterization of soil properties. In so doing, we address the rel...

We are presenting computational principles for the integration of auditory and visual spatial information, focusing on aspects regarding the formation, alignment and plasticity disparity between auditory and visual topographic maps. These principles are illustrated in the form of a four-layer network associated to two simple, purely local, unsupervised learning rules. Two “external”, independen...

This paper examines a biologically-inspired representation technique designed for the support of sensory-motor learning in developmental robotics. An interesting feature of the many topographic neural sheets in the brain is that closely packed receptive fields must overlap in order to fully cover a spatial region. This raises interesting scientific questions with engineering implications: e.g. ...

This paper presents a novel approach to finding a priori interesting regions in mammograms. We propose a topographic representation called the iso-level contour map consisting of iso-level contours at multiple intensity levels, in order to delineate those regions of interest (ROI’s) in mammograms which appear to be salient. Such salient areas form a dense quasi-concentric pattern of iso-level c...

Topographic mapping in planetary environments relies on accurate 3D scan registration methods. However, most registration algorithms such as ICP, GICP and NDT show poor convergence properties in these settings due to the poor structure of the Mars-like terrain and variable resolution, occluded, sparse range data that is hard to register without some a-priori knowledge of the environment. We rec...

The mammalian neocortex is a six-layered structure organized into radial columns. Within sensory cortical areas, information enters in the thalamorecipient layer and is further processed in supragranular and infragranular layers. Within the neocortex, topographic maps of stimulus features are present, but whether topographic patterns of active neurons change between laminae is unknown. Here, we...