In the paper, we analyze the software that realizes the self-organizing maps: SOM-PAK, SOM-TOOLBOX, Viscovery SOMine, Nenet, and two academic systems. Most of the software may be found in the Internet. These are freeware, shareware or demo. The self-organizing maps assist in data clustering and analyzing data similarities. The software differs one from another in the realization and visualizati...

Overstory vegetation maps of species and canopy cover were developed from Landsat 7 Thematic Enhanced Thematic Mapper satellite imagery. Ecosystem Monitoring plot data, collected during the 1997-2001 field seasons, were used as training sites for the image classification. Sixty-two species classes and four canopy cover classes were mapped. The maps will be used to support a Joint Fire Science P...

Snow cover mapping is a very important parameter for snowmelt runoff modeling and forecasting. Snow cover information is also useful for managing transportation and avalanche forecasting. This study will discuss the capability of full polarimetric L-band ALOS PALSAR data for snow classification. Therefore, Polarimetric decomposition and the complex Wishart classifier will be applied on ALOSPALS...

Fragmentation of forest types is an indicator of biodiversity in the Montreal Process, but the available national data permit assessment of only overall forestland fragmentation, not forest type fragmentation. Here we illustrate how to localize national statistics from the 2003 National Report on Sustainable Forests by combining state vegetation maps with national forestland fragmentation maps....

MINEO was a shared-cost action contracted in late 1999 with the Directorate General for Information Society Technology of the EU in the framework of the 5 European Research and Technological Development programme. MINEO was the first “hyperspectral project” carried out at European scale. It gathered seven Geological Surveys members of EuroGeoSurveys, two mining companies, the Joint Research Cen...

OBJECTIVES Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are used to produce predictions of potential Leguminosae diversity in West Central Africa. Those predictions are evaluated subsequently using expert opinion. The established methodology of combining all SDMs is refined to assess species diversity within five defined vegetation types. Potential species diversity is thus predicted for each vegetation ...

The contribution of understorey vegetation (UVEG) to forest ecosystem biomass and carbon (C) across diverse forest types has, to date, eluded quantification at regional and national scales. Efforts to quantify UVEG C have been limited to field-intensive studies or broad-scale modelling approaches lacking field measurements. Although large-scale inventories of UVEG C are not common, speciesand c...

Monitoring of reclaimed sites is a complex, interdisciplinary undertaking, especially in large, disturbed areas with difficult access. In that context, remote sensing is a unique and valuable tool that provides a synoptic view of an entire reclamation program and its progress over time, extending the more detailed but sparsely distributed in situ monitoring. Using remote sensing data, we are cr...

The focus of soil erosion research in the Alps has been in two categories: (i) on-sitemeasurements, which are rather small scale point measurements on selected plots often constrained to irrigation experiments or (ii) off-site quantification of sediment delivery at the outlet of the catchment. Results of both categories pointed towards the importance of an intact vegetation cover to prevent soi...