Significant spatial co-distribution pattern discovery

Given instances (spatial points) of different spatial features (categories), significant spatial co-distribution pattern discovery aims to find subsets of spatial features whose spatial distributions are statistically significantly similar to each other. Discovering significant spatial co-distribution patterns is important for many application domains such as identifying spatial associations between diseases and risk factors in spatial epidemiology. Previous methods mostly associated spatial features whose instances are frequently located together; however, this does not necessarily indicate a similarity in the spatial distributions between different features. Thus, this paper defines the significant spatial co-distribution pattern discovery problem and subsequently develops a novel method to solve it effectively. First, we propose a new measure, dissimilarity index, to quantify the difference between spatial distributions of different features under the spatial neighbor relation and then employ it in a distribution clustering method to detect candidate spatial co-distribution patterns. To further remove spurious patterns that occur accidentally, the validity of each candidate spatial co-distribution pattern is verified through a significance test under the null hypothesis that spatial distributions of different features are independent of each other. To model the null hypothesis, a distribution shift-correction method is presented by randomizing the relationships between different features and maintaining spatial structure of each feature (e.g., spatial auto-correlation). Comparisons with baseline methods using synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. A case study identifying co-morbidities in central Colorado is also presented to illustrate the real-world applicability of the proposed method.     

ECISER: Efficient Clip-art Image SEgmentation by Re-rasterization

Clip-art image segmentation is widely used as an essential step to solve many vision problems such as colorization and vectorization. Many of these applications not only demand accurate segmentation results, but also have little tolerance for time cost, which leads to the main challenge of this kind of segmentation. However, most existing segmentation techniques are found not sufficient for this purpose due to either their high computation cost or low accuracy. To address such issues, we propose a novel segmentation approach, ECISER, which is well-suited in this context. The basic idea of ECISER is to take advantage of the particular nature of cartoon images and connect image segmentation with aliased rasterization. Based on such relationship, a clip-art image can be quickly segmented into regions by re-rasterization of the original image and several other computationally efficient techniques developed in this paper. Experimental results show that our method achieves dramatic computational speedups over the current state-of-the-art approaches, while preserving almost the same quality of results.     

水文序列相依变异识别的RIC定阶准则——以自回归模型为例

水文过程相依性是水文变异的主要表现形式之一,应用自回归模型对其进行拟合时合理确定模型阶数是一个难点问题。本文在分析AIC和BIC准则的基础上,提出了一种以原序列与其相依成分的相关系数作为拟合度指标,同时借用信息熵形式的函数式,作为模型不确定性度量指标的自回归模型定阶准则(简称RIC准则)。以AR(1)、AR(2)、AR(3)和AR(4)模型为例进行统计试验,将不同序列长度下该准则的定阶准确率与其他定阶准则进行比较,试验结果表明,RIC准则对于上述模型均具有较好的适应性,且定阶准确率远高于AIC准则,其中对于前三阶模型RIC准则优于BIC准则,但四阶模型略低于BIC准则。RIC准则的优势是可以同时满足模型定阶、相依程度分级与模型检验的需求,将其应用于实测水文序列分析,结果显示,该准则能较准确地识别自回归模型的阶数,且符合提出的"相依有变异而残差无变异的最小阶数"的检验标准。     

基于遥感案例推理的海岸带养殖信息提取

目前基于目视解释或光谱分类的养殖信息提取效率低,难以克服由于地物混杂带来的“椒盐”噪声现象且难以融合地学知识。针对养殖信息提取中存在的问题,首先在分析现有养殖信息提取方法和案例推理CBR(Case\|Based Reasoning)用于遥感图像处理的基础上,提出基于遥感案例推理的海岸带养殖信息提取的研究思路;其次,结合养殖区域的空间特征和属性特征,构建案例的表达模型以及CBR相似性推理模型;最后,对不属于案例构建区的粤西沙田镇进行养殖信息提取的CBR实验,精度达到84.56%。对比CBR方法和传统监督分类方法可知,CBR方法是实现海岸带养殖信息快速准确提取的一种有效手段。     

Response of Hydrodynamics and Water-quality Conditions to Climate Change in a Shallow Lake

Lake water resources operation and water quality management come up with higher challenges due to climate change. The frequency and intensity of extreme hydrological events are increasing under global warming, which may directly lead to more uncertainty and complexity for hydrodynamic and water-quality conditions in large shallow lake. However, studies about effects of climate change on lake hydrodynamic and water-quality conditions are not enough. Thus, a coupled model is es-tablished to investigate the potential responses of lake water level, flow field and pollutant migra-tion to the changing climatic factors. The results imply that water flow capacity and self-purification in the Hongze Lake can be improved by west, northwest, north, south and southeast winds indi-cating wind filed change has a great effect on the hydrodynamic and water-quality conditions in large shallow lake. It is further observed that both hydrodynamics and water quality are more sensitive to rainfall change than to temperature change; compared to the effect from temperature and rainfall, the effect from wind field appear to be more pronounced. Moreover, the results verify the feasibility of coupling basin hydrological model with lake hydrodynamic and water quality model. To the best of knowledge, the coupled model should not be used until independent calibra-tions and verifications for hydrodynamics and water quality modeling, the hydrological model and the coupled model.

     

Recent climate variability and its impact on precipitation,temperature, and vegetation dynamics in the Lancang River headwater area of China

The alpine ecosystem is one of the most fragile ecosystems threatened by global climate change. The impact of climate variability on the vegetation dynamics of alpine ecosystems has become important in global change studies. In this study, spatially explicit gridded data, including the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) land-surface temperature (LST) product (MOD11A1/A2), the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) rainfall product (3B43), and MODIS net primary productivity (NPP) product (MOD17A3), together with meteorological observation data, were used to explore the spatio-temporal pattern of climate variability and its impact on vegetation dynamics from 2000 to 2012 in the Lancang River headwater area. We found that the variation patterns of LST, precipitation, and NPP in the study area showed remarkable spatial differences. From the northwest to the southeast the spatial variation of average annual LST exhibited a decreasing–increasing–decreasing–increasing pattern. At the same time, most of the study area exhibited an increasing LST during the growing season. The annual precipitation increased in the semi-arid northern part, whereas it decreased in the semi-humid southern part. The precipitation variability during the growing season has a pattern similar to the annual precipitation variability. Although the majority of the regions have seen an NPP increase from 2000 to 2012, the responses of the vegetation to the varied climate factors were spatially heterogeneous. The alpine–subalpine meadows in the high-altitude areas were more sensitive to climate variability in the growing season. It is argued that satellite remote-sensing products have great potential in investigating the impact of climate variability on vegetation dynamics at the finer scale, especially for the Lancang River headwater area with complex surface heterogeneity.     

济南主城区不透水地表分布分析及其水文效应

以济南市主城区范围为研究区,通过现场调研、遥感解译和划分标记的手段获取并探究其不透水地表分布。研究发现,济南市主城区范围内绿化率达到33.9%,不透水面积占比为65.3%。采用HIMS-SWMM模型进行小时尺度径流模拟,据此探究济南市主城区范围内各行政区不透水地表格局下其径流系数的变化情况。以2016年7-8月降雨作为输入,整个研究区共降水125.23mm,下渗量为36.33mm,产生的径流量为88.9mm,整个济南市主城区总体径流系数为0.71。各用地类型的不透水面占比与径流系数有较强的线性关系,其变化分为阈值型和渐变型。对于阈值型用地类型,可进行较为集中的绿化措施或LID措施;对于渐变型用地类型,可采用放缓的逐步绿化或LID措施,在集中改善阈值型用地类型的不透水面占比的同时,辅以较小范围的改善措施,以达到较为经济有效的防止内涝目的。     

An improved NDVI-based threshold method for estimating land surface emissivity using MODIS satellite data

This work estimated the land surface emissivities (LSEs) for MODIS thermal infrared channels 29 (8.4–8.7 μm), 31 (10.78–11.28 μm), and 32 (11.77–12.27 μm) using an improved normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)-based threshold method. The channel LSEs are expressed as functions of atmospherically corrected reflectance from the MODIS visible and near-infrared channels with wavelengths ranging from 0.4 to 2.2 μm for bare soil. To retain the angular information, the vegetation LSEs were explicitly expressed in the NDVI function. The results exhibited a root mean square error (RMSE) among the estimated LSEs using the improved method, and those calculated using spectral data from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) are below 0.01 for channels 31 and 32. The MODIS land surface temperature/emissivity (LST/E) products, MOD11_L2 with LSE derived via the classification-based method with 1 km resolution and MOD11C1 with LSE retrieved via the day/night LST retrieval method at 0.05° resolution, were used to validate the proposed method. The resultant variances and entropies for the LSEs estimated using the proposed method were larger than those extracted from MOD11_L2, which indicates that the proposed method better described the spectral variation for different land covers. In addition, comparing the estimated LSEs to those from MOD11C1 yielded RMSEs of approximately 0.02 for the three channels; however, more than 70% of pixels exhibited LSE differences within 0.01 for channels 31 and 32, which indicates that the proposed method feasibly depicts LSE variation for different land covers.     

A detection problem: Sensitivity and uncertainty analysis of a land surface temperature approach to detecting dynamics of water use by groundwater-dependent vegetation

Sustainable management of groundwater-dependent vegetation (GDV) requires the accurate identification of GDVs, characterisation of their water use dynamics and an understanding of associated errors. This paper presents sensitivity and uncertainty analyses of one GDV mapping method which uses temperature differences between time-series of modelled and observed land surface temperature (LST) to detect groundwater use by vegetation in a subtropical woodland. Uncertainty in modelled LST was quantified using the Jacobian method with error variances obtained from literature. Groundwater use was inferred where modelled and observed LST were significantly different using a Student's t-test. Modelled LST was most sensitive to low-range wind speeds (<1.5 m s⁻¹), low-range vegetation height (<=0.5 m), and low-range leaf area index (<=0.5 m² m⁻²), limiting the detectability of groundwater use by vegetation under such conditions. The model-data approach was well-suited to detection of GDV because model-data errors were lowest for climatic conditions conducive to groundwater use.