Ghost city extraction and rate estimation in China based on NPP-VIIRS night-time light data

The ghost city phenomenon is a serious problem resulting from the rapid urbanization process in China. Estimation of the ghost city rate (GCR) can provide information about vacant dwellings. This paper developed a methodology to quantitatively evaluate GCR values at the national scale using multi-resource remote sensing data. The Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership–Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer (NPP-VIIRS) night-time light data and moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) land cover data were used in the evaluation of the GCR values in China. The average ghost city rate (AGCR) was 35.1% in China in 2013. Shanghai had the smallest AGCR of 21.7%, while Jilin has the largest AGCR of 47.27%. There is a significant negative correlation between both the provincial AGCR and the per capita disposable income of urban households (R

Geo-Information Technology and Its Applications

Geo-information technology has been playing an ever more important role in environmental monitoring, land resource quantification and mapping, geo-disaster damage and risk assessment, urban planning and smart city development. This book focuses on the fundamental and applied research in these domains, aiming to promote exchanges and communications, share the research outcomes of scientists worldwide and to put these achievements better social use. This Special Issue collects fourteen high-quality research papers and is expected to provide a useful reference and technical support for graduate students, scientists, civil engineers and experts of governments to valorize scientific research

Colonization processes in long-lived species: Reintroductions as experimental approach

Understanding how density-dependent and independent processes influence demographic parameters, and hence regulate population size, is fundamental within population ecology. As Newton 1979 commented: “Effective conservation of raptors ultimately depends on a thorough understanding of what regulates their numbers”. Population regulation results from mechanisms that cause demographic density dependence: a negative feedback between population growth rate and population density (Newton, 1998). Identification of these mechanisms, as well as the way they operate, is of fundamental importance to ecology, and particularly for our understanding of colonization processes. To identify and measure these mechanisms, populations that have been reintroduced and monitored since the beginning of the process, constitute a useful source of valuable information ( Whitfield et al., 2009). Change in human attitude toward top predators is allowing an increase in distribution of previously human persecuted species. The separation model that kept wildlife in protected areas with the objective to protect wildlife from ourselves, is changing to the coexistence model as the human persecution decrease. Now a day, in Europe many recent conservation actions are related to biodiversity in human dominated landscapes. Here I analyze a Spanish Imperial eagle population in southern Spain and nighttime lights as a value of human activity from 2001 to 2015. Results show a decrease in the distance to nighttime lights over the studied period. Moreover, I found higher productivity values in territories closer to human activity. I concluded that with a change in human attitude, the availability of territory for the species is increasing and, without a direct human persecution, this new area could represent a high quality habitat for the species. Those changes will have potential influence in the selection of available habitat for species, with direct consequences in future reintroduction projects. For that, I suggest revising the habitat selection criteria for species previously human persecuted

Semantic location extraction from crowdsourced data

Crowdsourced Data (CSD) has recently received increased attention in many application areas including disaster management. Convenience of production and use, data currency and abundancy are some of the key reasons for attracting this high interest. Conversely, quality issues like incompleteness, credibility and relevancy prevent the direct use of such data in important applications like disaster management. Moreover, location information availability of CSD is problematic as it remains very low in many crowd sourced platforms such as Twitter. Also, this recorded location is mostly related to the mobile device or user location and often does not represent the event location. In CSD, event location is discussed descriptively in the comments in addition to the recorded location (which is generated by means of mobile device's GPS or mobile communication network). This study attempts to semantically extract the CSD location information with the help of an ontological Gazetteer and other available resources. 2011 Queensland flood tweets and Ushahidi Crowd Map data were semantically analysed to extract the location information with the support of Queensland Gazetteer which is converted to an ontological gazetteer and a global gazetteer. Some preliminary results show that the use of ontologies and semantics can improve the accuracy of place name identification of CSD and the process of location information extraction