Abstract. The root-mean-squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute (MAE) are widely used metrics for evaluating models. Yet, there remains enduring confusion over their use, such that a standard practice is to present both, leaving it the reader decide which more relevant. In recent reprise 200-year debate Willmott Matsuura (2005) Chai Draxler (2014) give arguments favoring one metric or other. How...

Vegetation properties can be estimated using optical sensors, acquiring data on board of different platforms. For instance, ground-based and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-borne spectrometers can measure reflectance in narrow spectral bands, while different modelling approaches, like regressions fitted to vegetation indices, can relate spectra with crop traits. Although monitoring frameworks usi...

Leaf area index (LAI) and vertical foliage profile (VFP) are among the important canopy structural variables. Recent advances in lidar remote sensing technology have demonstrated the capability of accurately mapping LAI and VFP over large areas. The primary objective of this study was to derive and validate a LAI and VFP product over the contiguous United States (CONUS) using spaceborne wavefor...

Purpose A pilot study showed that prediction of individual Humphrey 24-2 visual field (HVF 24-2) sensitivity thresholds from optical coherence tomography (OCT) image analysis is possible. We evaluate performance of an improved approach as well as 3 other predictive algorithms on a new, fully independent set of glaucoma subjects. Methods Subjects underwent HVF 24-2 and 9-field OCT (Heidelberg ...

Individual tree crowns may be delineated from airborne laser scanning (ALS) data by segmentation of surface models or by 3D analysis. Segmentation of surface models benefits from using a priori knowledge about the proportions of tree crowns, which has not yet been utilized for 3D analysis to any great extent. In this study, an existing surface segmentation method was used as a basis for a new t...

A methodology is described for the validation of Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) Terrestrial Chlorophyll Index (MTCI) data over heterogeneous land surfaces in an agricultural region in Southern Italy. The approach involves the use inverse canopy reflectance modeling techniques to derive maps of canopy chlorophyll content (CCC) and leaf area index (LAI) at fine spatial resolution....

Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) and ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) provide topographic data in a global scale which are freely available for users. The potential use of these datasets for many forestry applications is highly depending on the accuracy of the datasets. In this study, we evaluated the accuracy of SRTM and ASTER GDEM version 2 with high accuracy topographic da...

Radar altimetry was initially designed to measure the marine geoid. Thanks to the improvement in the orbit determination from the meter to the centimeter level, this technique has been providing accurate measurements of the sea surface topography over the open ocean since the launch of Topex/Poseidon in 1992. In spite of a decrease in the performance over land and coastal areas, it is now commo...

BACKGROUND Most predictive equations currently used to assess percentage body fat (%BF) were derived from persons in industrialized Western societies. OBJECTIVE We developed equations to predict %BF from anthropometric measurements in rural and urban Guatemalan adults. DESIGN Body density was measured in 123 women and 114 men by using hydrostatic weighing and simultaneous measurement of res...

OBJECTIVE To help facilitate economic evaluations of oncology treatments, we mapped responses on cancer-specific instrument to generic preference-based measures. METHODS Cancer patients (n = 367) completed one cancer-specific instrument, the FACT-G, and two preference-based measures, the EQ-5D and SF-6D. Responses were randomly divided to form development (n = 184) and cross-validation (n = 1...