Describing vegetation types is critical for managing natural resources and assessing ecosystem risk. Vegetation maps are historically produced by “Western experts,” often ignoring local-level groups critical to resource management. Indigenous hunters, as resource managers, have strong connections to their landscapes and their descriptions of vegetation within their homelands can be useful in th...

Comprehensive research on glacier changes in the Tian Shan is available for the current decade; however, there is limited information about glacier investigations of previous decades and especially before the mid 1970s. The earliest stereo images from the Corona missions were acquired in the 1960s but existing studies dealing with these images focus on single glaciers or small areas only. We de...

Geoinformation derived from Earth observation (EO) plays a key role for detecting, analyzing and monitoring landslides to assist hazard and risk analysis. Within the framework of the EC-GMES-FP7 project SAFER (Services and Applications For Emergency Response) a semi-automated object-based approach for landslide detection and classification has been developed. The method was applied to a case st...

In this paper new and innovative techniques during the commissioning phase of TanDEM-X will be presented that are firstly demonstrated on a satellite platform. The focus is on the secondary goals of TanDEM-X that are assigned for the third year of the mission time life due to the tight schedule for the acquisition of the highly accurate global digital elevation model. Therefore, a variety of sc...

In this paper, the characterization of catchments extracted from multiscale digital elevation models (DEMs) is performed. First, the lifting scheme is employed to generate multiscale DEMs. The catchments extracted from the generated multiscale DEMs are then characterized based on their numbers. A power law relationship is derived between the number of extracted catchments and the kernel size. T...

We present a study about the possibility to detect neutrino induced extensive air showers at the Pierre Auger Observatory. The Monte Carlo simulations performed take into account the details of the neutrino propagation inside the Earth, the air as well as the surrounding mountains which are modelled by a digital elevation map. Details on the sensitivity with respect to the incoming direction as...

Airborne Lidar system provides the Earth’s topography as 3D point clouds. Many algorithms have been implemented to sort out the automatic classification problem as well as the Digital Terrain Model generation (DTM). This is mainly due to the various aspects of landscapes within a global survey which can include urban, forested or mountainous areas. This paper is focused on the generation of DTM...

The accurate and rapid identification of landslide region is the basis for emergency disaster processing and analysis. The identification methods based on change information among multi-temporal remote optical sensing images are simple and intuitive. But its performance is remarkably limited by issues, such as unable to distinguish the changes according to the causes, improper processing strate...

Although the topography of tidal flats is important for understanding their evolution, the spatial and temporal sampling frequency of such data remains limited. The waterline method has the potential to retrieve past tidal flat topography by utilizing large archives of satellite images. This study performs a quantitative analysis of the relationship between the accuracy of tidal flat digital el...

The topographic wetness index (TWI, ln(a/tanβ)), which combines local upslope contributing area and slope, is commonly used to quantify topographic control on hydrological processes. Methods of computing this index differ primarily in the way the upslope contributing area is calculated. In this study we compared a number of calculation methods for TWI and evaluated them in terms of their correl...