To alleviate the severe rocky desertification and improve the ecological conditions in Southwest China, the national and local Chinese governments have implemented a series of Ecological Restoration Projects since the late 1990s. In this context, remote sensing can be a valuable tool for conservation management by monitoring vegetation dynamics, projecting the persistence of vegetation trends a...

In North-western Iceland, records of slope processes were increasing during the twentieth century. Few dramatic events during the last decades highlighted the danger due to slope dynamics, leaving local populations in a risk situation that was merely unknown before 1970. The recent snow-avalanche, debris-flow and rock-fall activity underlined that the most frequent processes are not these with ...

We obtain constraints on the slope of a universal stellar initial mass function (IMF) over a range of cosmic star-formation histories (SFH) using z ≈ 0.1 luminosity densities in the range from 0.2μm to 2.2μm. The age-IMF degeneracy of integrated spectra of stellar populations can be broken for the Universe as a whole by using direct measurements of (relative) cosmic SFH from high-redshift obser...

New methods have been investigated which use fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (POLSAR) image data to measure ocean wave slopes. Independent techniques have been developed to measure wave slope spectra in both the radar azimuth and range directions. Wave spectra measured using the new methods are compared with spectra developed using conventional SAR intensity-based methods, and with ...

The number of large slope failures in some high-mountain regions such as the European Alps has increased during the past two to three decades. There is concern that recent climate change is driving this increase in slope failures, thus possibly further exacerbating the hazard in the future. Although the effects of a gradual temperature rise on glaciers and permafrost have been extensively studi...

The passage from discrete schemes for surface line defects (steps) to nonlinear macroscopic laws for crystals is studied via formal asymptotics in one space dimension. Our goal is to illustrate by explicit computations the emergence from step motion laws of continuum-scale power series expansions for the slope near the edges of large, flat surface regions (facets). We consider surface diffusion...