Effects of soil composition and mineralogy on remote sensing of crop residue cover

The management of crop residues (non-photosynthetic vegetation) in agricultural fields influences soil erosion and soil carbon sequestration. Remote sensing methods can efficiently assess crop residue cover and related tillage intensity over many fields in a region. Although the reflectance spectra of soils and crop residues are often similar in the visible, near infrared, and the lower part of the shortwave infrared (400-1900 nm) wavelength region, specific diagnostic chemical absorption features are evident in the upper shortwave infrared (1900-2500 nm) region. Two reflectance band height indices used for estimating residue cover are the Cellulose Absorption Index (CAI) and the Lignin-Cellulose Absorption (LCA) index, both of which use reflectances in the upper shortwave infrared (SWIR). Soil mineralogy and composition will affect soil spectral properties and may limit the usefulness of these spectral indices in certain areas. Our objectives were to (1) identify minerals and soil components with absorption features in the 2000 nm to 2400 nm wavelength region that would affect CAI and LCA and (2) assess their potential impact on remote sensing estimates of crop residue cover. Most common soil minerals had CAI values ≤ 0.5, whereas crop residues were always > 0.5, allowing for good contrast between soils and residues. However, a number of common soil minerals had LCA values > 0.5, and, in some cases, the mineral LCA values were greater than those of the crop residues, which could limit the effectiveness of LCA for residue cover estimation. The LCA of some dry residues and live corn canopies were similar in value, unlike CAI. Thus, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) or similar method should be used to separate out green vegetation pixels. Mineral groups, such as garnets and chlorites, often have wide ranges of CAI and LCA values, and thus, mineralogical analyses often do not identify individual mineral species required for precise CAI estimation. However, these methods are still useful for identifying mineral soils requiring additional scrutiny. Future advanced multi- and hyperspectral remote sensing platforms should include CAI bands to allow for crop residue cover estimation.     

Testing a MODIS Global Disturbance Index across North America

Large-scale ecosystem disturbances (LSEDs) have major impacts on the global carbon cycle as large pulses of CO₂ and other trace gases from terrestrial biomass loss are emitted to the atmosphere during disturbance events. The high temporal and spatial variability of the atmospheric emissions combined with the lack of a proven methodology to monitor LSEDs at the global scale make the timing, location and extent of vegetation disturbance a significant uncertainty in understanding the global carbon cycle. The MODIS Global Disturbance Index (MGDI) algorithm is designed for large-scale, regular, disturbance mapping using Aqua/Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Land Surface Temperature (LST) and Aqua/MODIS Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) data. The MGDI uses annual maximum composite LST data to detect fundamental changes in land-surface energy partitioning, while avoiding the high natural variability associated with tracking LST at daily, weekly, or seasonal time frames. Here we apply the full Aqua/MODIS dataset through 2006 to the improved MGDI algorithm across the woody ecosystems of North America and test the algorithm by comparison with confirmed, historical wildfire events and the windfall areas of documented major hurricanes. The MGDI accurately detects the location and extent of wildfire throughout North America and detects high and moderate severity impacts in the windfall area of major hurricanes. We also find detections associated with clear-cut logging and land-clearing on the forest-agricultural interface. The MGDI indicates that 1.5% (195,580 km²) of the woody ecosystems within North America was disturbed in 2005 and 0.5% (67,451 km²) was disturbed in 2006. The interannual variability is supported by wildfire detections and official burned area statistics.     

An improved lossless data hiding scheme based on image VQ-index residual value coding

Copyright protection and information security have become serious problems due to the ever growing amount of digital data over the Internet. Reversible data hiding is a special type of data hiding technique that guarantees not only the secret data but also the cover media can be reconstructed without any distortion. Traditional schemes are based on spatial, discrete cosine transformation (DCT) and discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) domains. Recently, some vector quantization (VQ) based reversible data hiding schemes have been proposed. This paper proposes an improved reversible data hiding scheme based on VQ-index residual value coding. Experimental results show that our scheme outperforms two recently proposed schemes, namely side-match vector quantization (SMVQ)-based data hiding and modified fast correlation vector quantization (MFCVQ)-based data hiding.     

Index calculus for abelian varieties of small dimension and the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem

We propose an index calculus algorithm for the discrete logarithm problem on general abelian varieties of small dimension. The main difference with the previous approaches is that we do not make use of any embedding into the Jacobian of a well-suited curve. We apply this algorithm to the Weil restriction of elliptic curves and hyperelliptic curves over small degree extension fields. In particular, our attack can solve an elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem defined over in heuristic asymptotic running time ; and an elliptic problem over or a genus 2 problem over in heuristic asymptotic running time .     

Prevalence and personality correlates of Facebook bullying among university undergraduates

The purpose of the present study was to examine the prevalence of cyber-bullying through Facebook in a sample of 226 Greek university undergraduates, and to explore whether big five personality characteristics, narcissism, as well as attitudes toward Facebook, technological knowledge and skills were predictive of such behavior. Participants completed a self-report questionnaire measuring the above constructs. Results indicated that almost one third of the sample reported Facebook bullying engagement at least once during the past month, with male students reporting more frequent involvement than females. Bullying through Facebook was predicted by low Agreeableness and more time spent on Facebook only for males, whereas for females none of the studied variables predicted engagement in Facebook bullying. Findings are discussed in terms of prevention and intervention strategies.     

Generalized Possibilistic Fuzzy C-Means with novel cluster validity indices for clustering noisy data

A generalized form of Possibilistic Fuzzy C-Means (PFCM) algorithm (GPFCM) is presented for clustering noisy data. A function of distance is used instead of the distance itself to damp noise contributions. It is shown that when the data are highly noisy, GPFCM finds accurate cluster centers but FCM (Fuzzy C-Means), PCM (Possibilistic C-Means), and PFCM algorithms fail. FCM, PCM, and PFCM yield inaccurate cluster centers when clusters are not of the same size or covariance norm is used, whereas GPFCM performs well for both of the cases even when the data are noisy. It is shown that generalized forms of FCM and PCM (GFCM and GPCM) are also more accurate than FCM and PCM. A measure is defined to evaluate performance of the clustering algorithms. It shows that average error of GPFCM and its simplified forms are about 80% smaller than those of FCM, PCM, and PFCM. However, GPFCM demands higher computational costs due to nonlinear updating equations. Three cluster validity indices are introduced to determine number of clusters in clean and noisy datasets. One of them considers compactness of the clusters; the other considers separation of the clusters, and the third one considers both separation and compactness. Performance of these indices is confirmed to be satisfactory using various examples of noisy datasets.     

Reprocessing the MODIS Leaf Area Index products for land surface and climate modelling

Land surface and climate modelling requires continuous and consistent Leaf Area Index (LAI). High spatiotemporal resolution and long-time record data are more in demand nowadays and will continue to be in the future. MODIS LAI products meet these requirements to some degree. However, due to the presence of cloud and seasonal snow cover, the instrument problems and the uncertainties of retrieval algorithm, the current MODIS LAI products are spatially and temporally discontinuous and inconsistent, which limits their application in land surface and climate modelling. To improve the MODIS LAI products on a global scale, we considered the characteristics of the MODIS LAI data and made the best use of quality control (QC) information, and developed an integrated two-step method to derive the improved MODIS LAI products effectively and efficiently on a global scale. First, we used the modified temporal spatial filter (mTSF) method taking advantage of background values and QC information at each pixel to do a simple data assimilation for relatively low quality data. Then we applied the post processing-TIMESAT (A software package to analyze time-series of satellite sensor data) Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter to get the final result. We implemented the method to 10 years of the MODIS Collection 5 LAI data. In comparison with the LAI reference maps and the MODIS LAI data, our results showed that the improved MODIS LAI data are closer to the LAI reference maps in magnitude and also more continuous and consistent in both time-series and spatial domains. In addition, simple statistics were used to evaluate the differences between the MODIS LAI and the improved MODIS LAI.     

A fast and robust bulk-loading algorithm for indexing very large digital elevation datasets: I. Algorithm

Digital elevation models (DEMs) constitute a valuable source of data for a number of geoscience-related applications. The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) collected and made available to the public the world's largest DEM (composed of billions of points) until that date. The SRTM DEM is stored on the NASA repository as a well-organized collection of flat files. The retrieval of this stored topographic information about a region of interest involves one selection of a proper list of files, their downloading, data filtering in the desired region, and their processing according to user needs. With the aim to provide an easier and faster access to this data by improving its further analysis and processing, we have indexed the SRTM DEM by means of a spatial indexing based on the kd-tree data structure, called the Q-tree. This paper is the first in a two-part series that describes the method followed to build an index on such huge amounts of data, minimizing the number of insert operations. We demonstrate that our method can build a very efficient space-partitioning index, with good performance in both point and range queries on the spatial data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only successful spatial indexing proposal in the literature that deals with such a huge volume of data.     

Stability radius of implicit dynamic equations with constant coefficients on time scales

This paper deals with the stability radii of implicit dynamic equations on time scales when the structured perturbations act on both the coefficient of derivative and the right-hand side. Formulas of the stability radii are derived as a unification and generalization of some previous results. A special case where the real stability radius and the complex stability radius are equal is studied. Examples are derived to illustrate results.     

YHSSAS:面向大规模网络的安全态势感知系统

网络安全态势感知系统NSSAS(Network Security Situation Awareness System)能够感知网络安全的整体态势,对提高网络的应急响应和主动防御能力具有重要作用.现有的NSSAS处理能力有限,难以应用于国家骨干网等大规模网络.介绍了一个面向大规模网络的安全态势感知系统YHSSAS,首先...