Traditional geographic information system (GIS)-overlay routines usually build on relatively simple data models. Topology is - if at all - calculated on the fly for very specific tasks only. If, for example, a change comparison is conducted between two or more polygon layers, the result leads mostly to a complete and also very complex from-to class intersection. A lot of additional processing s...

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the interest of High Spatial Resolution Imagery (HSRI) and the limits of coarse land cover data such as CORINE Land Cover (CLC), for the accurate characterization of land cover structure along river corridors and of its functional links with freshwater ecological status on a large scale. For this purpose, we compared several spatial indicators built from ...

Since 2003 the spaceborne laser altimetry system on board of NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) has acquired a large world-wide database of full waveform data organized in 15 products. In this research three products are evaluated over The Netherlands. For this purpose the raw full waveform product, the derived Gaussian decomposition product and the global land evaluation p...

Real-time assessment of the ambient air quality has gained an increased interest in recent years. To give support to this evolution, the statistical air pollution interpolation model RIO is developed. Due to the very low computational cost this interpolation model is an efficient tool for an environment agency when performing real-time air quality assessments. Beside this, a reliable interpolat...

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon prevalently concerns industrialized countries. It consists of a significant increase in temperatures, especially in industrialized and urbanized areas, in particular, during extreme warm periods like summer. This paper explores the climate variability of temperatures in two stations located in Matera city (Southern Italy), evaluating the increase in temper...

The problem of generalizing spatial data is studied in the context of land cover data. The theory behind automatic generalization is reviewed and a raster based deterministic iterative generalization method is proposed. The methodology is based on the Map Algebra. The multivariate statistical testing methods are extended to deal also with generalized land cover data. The case study is related t...

During the last century the Italian coastal system has been involved in a strong anthropic process (i.e. process of colonization by man of natural habitat, with consequent modification and alteration of the same ones), which remarkably has transformed the natural and enviromental characteristics of the territory. In order to define protection programs and development plans, One of the most impo...

Within the MARS Crop Yield Forecasting System (MCYFS; Royer and Genovese, 2004) of the European Commission vegetation indicators like NDVI, SAVI and fAPAR are operationally derived for daily, decadal and monthly time steps. Besides low resolution sensors as SPOT-VGT and NOAA-AVHRR, medium resolution data from TERRA/AQUA-MODIS or ENVISAT-MERIS are used at pan-European level. In case of available...

We studied the land-cover data used by the regional climate model REMO and the land surface model JSBACH, for Finland and surrounding areas. To date, the land-cover data determining REMO’s surface parameterisations have originated from the Global Ecosystem classification of the Global Land Cover Characteristics (GLCC-GEC) database. The same database has also been used as basis for prescribed pl...