Handbook of Mathematical Geosciences

This Open Access handbook published at the IAMG's 50th anniversary, presents a compilation of invited path-breaking research contributions by award-winning geoscientists who have been instrumental in shaping the IAMG. It contains 45 chapters that are categorized broadly into five parts (i) theory, (ii) general applications, (iii) exploration and resource estimation, (iv) reviews, and (v) reminiscences covering related topics like mathematical geosciences, mathematical morphology, geostatistics, fractals and multifractals, spatial statistics, multipoint geostatistics, compositional data analysis, informatics, geocomputation, numerical methods, and chaos theory in the geosciences

New Technologies in the Oil and Gas Industry

Oil and gas are the most important non-renewable sources of energy. Exploring, producing and managing these resources in compliance with HSE standards are challenging tasks. New technologies, workflows and procedures have to be implemented.This book deals with some of these themes and describes some of the advanced technologies related to the oil and gas industry from HSE to field management issues. Some new technologies for geo-modeling, transient well testing and digital rock physics are also introduced. There are many more technical topics to be addressed in future books. This book is aimed at researchers, petroleum engineers, geoscientists and people working within the petroleum industry

Subsurface Characterization by Means of Geovisual Analytics

This Thesis is concerned with one of the major problems in subsurface characterizations emerging from ever-increasing loads of data in the last decades: What kind of technologies suit well for extracting novel, valid and useful knowledge from persistent data repositories for the characterization of subsurface regions and how can such technologies be implemented in an integrated, community-open software platform? In order to address those questions, an interactive, open-source software platform for geoscientific knowledge discovery has been developed, which enables domain experts to generate, optimize and validate prognostic models of the subsurface domain. Such a free tool has been missing in the geoscientific community so far. The extensible software platform GeoReVi (Geological Reservoir Virtualization) implements selected aspects of geovisual analytics with special attention being paid to an implementation of the knowledge discovery in databases process. With GeoReVi the human expert can model and visualize static and dynamic systems in the subsurface in a feedback cycle. The created models can be analyzed and parameterized by means of modern approaches from geostatistics and data mining. Hence, knowledge that is useful to both the assessment of subsurface potentials and to support decision-making during the utilization process of the subsurface regions can be extracted and exchanged in a formalized manner. The modular software application is composed of both integrated and centralized databases, a graphical user interface and a business logic. In order to fulfill the needs of low computing time in accordance with high computational complexity of spatial problems, the software system makes intense use of parallelism and asynchronous programming. The competitiveness of industry branches, which are aimed at utilizing the subsurface in unknown regions, such as the geothermal energy production or carbon capture and storage, are especially dependent on the quality of spatial forecasts for relevant rock and fluid properties. Thus, the focus of this work has been laid upon the implementation of algorithms, which enhance the predictability of properties in space under consideration of uncertainty. The software system was therefore evaluated in ample real-world scenarios by solving problems from scientific, educational and industrial projects. The implemented software system shows an excellent suitability to generically address spatial problems such as interpolation or stochastic simulation under consideration of numerical uncertainty. In this context, GeoReVi served as a tool for discovering new knowledge with special regard to investigating the heterogeneity of rock media on multiple scales of investigation. Among others, it could be demonstrated that the three-dimensional scalar fields of different petrophysical and geochemical properties in sandstone media may diverge significantly at small-scales. In fact, if the small-scale variability is not considered in field-scale projects, in which the sampling density is usually low, statistical correlations and thus empirical relationships might be feigned. Furthermore, it could be demonstrated that the simple kriging variance, which is used to simulate the natural variability in sequential simulations, systematically underestimates the intrinsic variability of the investigated sandstone media. If the small-scale variability can be determined by high-resolution sampling, it can be used to enhance conditional simulations at the scale of depositional environments

Advances in Computational Intelligence Applications in the Mining Industry

This book captures advancements in the applications of computational intelligence (artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc.) to problems in the mineral and mining industries. The papers present the state of the art in four broad categories: mine operations, mine planning, mine safety, and advances in the sciences, primarily in image processing applications. Authors in the book include both researchers and industry practitioners

Risk Adjusted Evaluation of Mineral Assets Using Transaction Based Statistical Models

This thesis addresses “how the characteristics of gold deposit transactions affect their price” through investigation of four hypotheses related to risks that often affect price: ownership, commodity price, certainty and country-risk. An empirical approach based on geostatistical methods is used to determine the behaviour of gold deposit prices in response to the risks. The results identify differences between security and asset price behaviour, as well as challenge the validity of accepted pricing methods and assumptions

Human and environmental exposure to hydrocarbon pollution in the Niger Delta:A geospatial approach

This study undertook an integrated geospatial assessment of human and environmental exposure to oil pollution in the Niger Delta using primary and secondary spatial data. This thesis begins by presenting a clear rationale for the study of extensive oil pollution in the Niger Delta, followed by a critical literature review of the potential application of geospatial techniques for monitoring and managing the problem. Three analytical chapters report on the methodological developments and applications of geospatial techniques that contribute to achieving the aim of the study. Firstly, a quantitative assessment of human and environmental exposure to oil pollution in the Niger Delta was performed using a government spill database. This was carried out using Spatial Analysis along Networks (SANET), a geostatistical tool, since oil spills in the region tend to follow the linear patterns of the pipelines. Spatial data on pipelines, oil spills, population and land cover data were analysed in order to quantify the extent of human and environmental exposure to oil pollution. The major causes of spills and spatial factors potentially reinforcing reported causes were analysed. Results show extensive general exposure and sabotage as the leading cause of oil pollution in the Niger Delta. Secondly, a method of delineating the river network in the Niger Delta using Sentinel-1 SAR data was developed, as a basis for modelling potential flow of pollutants in the distributary pathways of the network. The cloud penetration capabilities of SAR sensing are particularly valuable for this application since the Niger Delta is notorious for cloud cover. Vector and raster-based river networks derived from Sentinel-1 were compared to alternative river map products including those from the USGS and ESA. This demonstrated the superiority of the Sentinel-1 derived river network, which was subsequently used in a flow routing analysis to demonstrate the potential for understanding oil spill dispersion. Thirdly, the study applied optical remote sensing for indirect detection and mapping of oil spill impacts on vegetation. Multi-temporal Landsat data was used to delineate the spill impact footprint of a notable 2008 oil spill incident in Ogoniland and population exposure was evaluated. The optical data was effective in impact area delineation, demonstrating extensive and long-lasting population exposure to oil pollution. Overall, this study has successfully assembled and produced relevant spatial and attribute data sets and applied integrated geostatistical analytical techniques to understand the distribution and impacts of oil spills in the Niger Delta. The study has revealed the extensive level of human and environmental exposure to hydrocarbon pollution in the Niger Delta and introduced new methods that will be valuable fo

The Digital Agricultural Revolution: a Bibliometric Analysis Literature Review

The application of digital technologies in agriculture can improve traditional practices to adapt to climate change, reduce Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions, and promote a sustainable intensification for food security. Some authors argued that we are experiencing a Digital Agricultural Revolution (DAR) that will boost sustainable farming. This study aims to find evidence of the ongoing DAR process and clarify its roots, what it means, and where it is heading. We investigated the scientific literature with bibliometric analysis tools to produce an objective and reproducible literature review. We retrieved 4995 articles by querying the Web of Science database in the timespan 2012-2019, and we analyzed the obtained dataset to answer three specific research questions: i) what is the spectrum of the DAR-related terminology?; ii) what are the key articles and the most influential journals, institutions, and countries?; iii) what are the main research streams and the emerging topics? By grouping the authors' keywords reported on publications, we identified five main research streams: Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), Site-Specific Management (SSM), Remote Sensing (RS), Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). To provide a broad overview of each of these topics, we analyzed relevant review articles, and we present here the main achievements and the ongoing challenges. Finally, we showed the trending topics of the last three years (2017, 2018, 2019)

Transforming scientific research and development in precision agriculture : the case of hyperspectral sensing and imaging : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Agriculture at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand. EMBARGOED until 30 September 2023.

Embargoed until 30 September 2023There has been increasing social and academic debate in recent times surrounding the arrival of agricultural big data. Capturing and responding to real world variability is a defining objective of the rapidly evolving field of precision agriculture (PA). While data have been central to knowledge-making in the field since its inception in the 1980s, research has largely operated in a data-scarce environment, constrained by time-consuming and expensive data collection methods. While there is a rich tradition of studying scientific practice within laboratories in other fields, PA researchers have rarely been the explicit focal point of detailed empirical studies, especially in the laboratory setting. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to new knowledge of the influence of big data technologies through an ethnographic exploration of a working PA laboratory. The researcher spent over 30 months embedded as a participant observer of a small PA laboratory, where researchers work with nascent data rich remote sensing technologies. To address the research question: “How do the characteristics of technological assemblages affect PA research and development?” the ethnographic case study systematically identifies and responds to the challenges and opportunities faced by the science team as they adapt their scientific processes and resources to refine value from a new data ecosystem. The study describes the ontological characteristics of airborne hyperspectral sensing and imaging data employed by PA researchers. Observations of the researchers at work lead to a previously undescribed shift in the science process, where effort moves from the planning and performance of the data collection stage to the data processing and analysis stage. The thesis develops an argument that changing data characteristics are central to this shift in the scientific method researchers are employing to refine knowledge and value from research projects. Importantly, the study reveals that while researchers are working in a rapidly changing environment, there is little reflection on the implications of these changes on the practice of science-making. The study also identifies a disjunction to how science is done in the field, and what is reported. We discover that the practices that provide disciplinary ways of doing science are not established in this field and moments to learn are siloed because of commercial constraints the commercial structures imposed in this case study of contemporary PA research