A Remote Sensing-Based Analysis of the Impact of Syrian Crisis on Agricultural Land Abandonment in Yarmouk River Basin

In this study, we implemented a remote sensing-based approach for monitoring abandoned agricultural land in the Yarmouk River Basin (YRB) in Southern Syria and Northern Jordan during the Syrian crisis. A time series analysis for the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI) was conducted using 1650 multi-temporal images from Landsat-5 and Landsat-8 between 1986 and 2021. We analyzed the agricultural phenological profiles and investigated the impact of the Syrian crisis on agricultural activities in YRB. The analysis was performed using JavaScript commands in Google Earth Engine. The results confirmed the impact of the Syrian crisis on agricultural land use. The phenological characteristics of NDVI and NDMI during the crisis (2013–2021) were compared to the phenological profiles for the period before the crisis (1986–2010). The NDVI and NDMI profiles had smooth, bell-shaped, and single beak NDVI and NDMI values during the period of crisis in comparison to those irregular phenological profiles for the period before the crisis or during the de-escalation/reconciliation period in the study area. The maximum average NDVI and NDMI values was found in March during the crisis, indicating the progress of natural vegetation and fallow land, while they fluctuated between March and April before the crisis or during the de-escalation/reconciliation period, indicating regular agricultural and cultivation practices

Evaluating the Impact of the Influx of Syrian Refugees on Land Use/Land Cover Change in Irbid District, Northwestern Jordan

The refugee movement creates urban and environmental pressures at their destination locations. This pressure often presents in the form of Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) change. This study seeks to understand the impact of the Syrian refugees’ influence on changing the urban and agricultural land dynamics in Irbid district in northwestern Jordan from 1985 to 2021, including the period of the civil war in Syria, using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images for the years 1985 and 2004, and the Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) for the years 2013 and 2021. The Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform was used to conduct all image processing and perform calculations and classification analysis using the Random Forest (RF) approach. The study of the classified images compared LULC before and during the Syrian crisis using images from 1985, 2004, 2013, and 2021. The results show that the urban area increased. In parallel, agricultural land increased. During the Syrian refugee crisis, agriculture became a significant livelihood activity for Syrian refugees. In summary, the movement of the refugees to Irbid district caused an increased demand for land and housing, which accelerated the building and construction process

Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

Development of a Remote Sensing-Based Agriculture Monitoring Drought Index and Its Application Over Semi-Arid Region

Agricultural drought is a natural disaster that usually occurs when the available water content goes below the optimal needs of the proper growth of plants during its growing season. It has enormous impacts on economic, environmental, and social sectors. In this study, our overall objective was to develop a fully remote sensing-based method for monitoring agricultural drought conditions and evaluate its performance over a semi-arid heterogeneous rainfed agricultural dominant landscape in Jordan. In general, remote sensing data having both high spatial and temporal resolutions would be required for evaluating agricultural drought conditions, as usually agriculture land cover would be relatively heterogeneous and small in size, while drought could occur during critical short time periods i.e., few days or weeks during the growing season. However, due to different technical and cost issues such high spatio-temporal remote sensing data are still unavailable. Thus, we opted to develop a spatio-temporal image-fusion model (STI-FM) to generate synthetic Landsat-8 like data with 30 m spatial and 8 day temporal resolutions upon combining regular Landsat-8 (having 30 m spatial with 16 day temporal resolutions) with moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS)-based 8-day composite data having 250-1000 m spatial resolutions. Then, we used these fused data in developing the agricultural drought monitoring index (ADI) as a combination of three uncorrelated remote sensing-based agricultural drought related variables [i.e., normalized difference water index (NDWI), visible and shortwave drought index (VSDI), and land surface temperature (LST)]. Results showed that the proposed STI-FM was able to produce synthetic Landsat-8 data with strong accuracy (i.e., r2 were in the range 0.71 to 0.90). The evaluation of agricultural drought conditions over the study area using the proposed remote sensing-based agricultural drought index showed high agreements such as 85% overall accuracy and 78% Kappa-values, when compared to ground based 8-day standardised precipitation index (SPI) values. These strong results demonstrated that the proposed methods would be great in monitoring agricultural drought conditions at agricultural field scale (i.e., high spatial resolution) and short time periods (i.e., high temporal resolution)

GIS-Based Safety Bus Stops-Serdang and Seri Kembangan Case Study

Enhancing a bus transit system is a possible solution to the growth of congestion in urban areas. Issues related to the safety of bus passengers, either on board or during their travel to a bus stop, should be considered. This article presents a GIS method to identify risky bus stops on a single bus route in the Serdang and Seri Kempangan area according to three attributes: location, characteristics, and surface. The aim is to improve the safety of bus stops in the area. Results show that GIS is a good tool to achieve the purpose of this study

A comprehensive remote sensing-based Agriculture Drought Condition Indicator (CADCI) using machine learning

Agriculture drought is a decrease in soil moisture during a growing season. In this study, a comprehensive remote sensing-based Agriculture Drought Condition Indicator (CADCI) was developed to monitor the agriculture drought in semi-arid environments and assess its effectiveness in rainfed agriculture regions in (A) Jordan and (B) Syria. First, remote sensed-based drought-condition spectral indices [i.e., Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), Temperature Condition Index (TCI), Evapotranspiration Condition Index (ETCI), Precipitation Condition Index (PCI), Soil Moisture Condition Index (SMCI), and Vegetation Health Index (VHI)] were calculated using data from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite (MODIS) [Land Surface Temperature (LST), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and evapotranspiration (ET)]; the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPMs); the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAPs); and Sentinel-1A. Second, Random Forest (RF) was used to estimate and determine the relative importance of these indices based on Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) values to select the three spectral indices that have the most monthly short-term relative importance in identifying the agriculture drought for semi-arid environments, which were PCI, TCI, and VCI. Third, these indices were integrated to identify the drought severity based on specific thresholds that compare the pixel-specific value with the study area average value. For instance, a severe drought condition is identified if all three indices indicate a drought condition, a moderate drought or mild drought conditions are identified if any two or any one of the indices indicate drought conditions, respectively. Lastly, a none drought condition is identified if none of the indices indicate a drought condition. Finally, the SPI sets for 1 and 3-months (SPI-1 and SPI-3) were used to evaluate the performance of the CADCI. The results showed the CADCI has a high agreement with SPI-1 classes in the study areas, with overall accuracy and Kappa-values of 85% and 0.80, for study area A and 83% and 0.76 for study area B, respectively. Consequently, the CADCI shows its ability to monitor agricultural drought in semi-arid environments. Perhaps, it could be applicable for larger areas due to the spatial resolution of the input dataset

Fusion of MODIS and Landsat-8 Surface Temperature Images: A New Approach

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A cascaded data fusion approach for extracting the rooftops of buildings in heterogeneous urban fabric using high spatial resolution satellite imagery and elevation data

In this study, a cascaded data fusion approach was implemented to extract the rooftops of buildings from remote sensing data in a heterogeneous urban fabric in Irbid city, Jordan. The rooftops of buildings were extracted from Pleiades-B1 very high spatial resolution imagery (i.e., 2 m) along with LiDAR-derived normalized digital surface model (nDSM) data and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The imagery from Pleiades-B1 satellite was classified using support vector machine (SVM), then a normalized digital surface model (nDSM) was calculated to generate the heights map. Then, the trees and vegetation cover were filtered using NDVI in which different threshold values were tested to achieve the best identification of the rooftops of buildings. The results of the SVM, nDSM, and NDVI maps were combined to obtain one layer representing the rooftops of buildings in the study area. Finally, the results were evaluated against reference data obtained from the municipality of Irbid and ground surveying. The correctness and completeness measures of the detected buildings’ footprints were 0.956, 0.854 and 0.902 for the precision, recall, and F-score respectively. The total area of the extracted rooftops of buildings was approximately 6.2 km2 when compared to the area of the registered buildings in the municipality of Irbid (i.e., 5.9 km2) in 2021. The results proved the possibility of using the implemented method in mapping the rooftops of buildings in such a heterogeneous urban fabric in the study area

Remote sensing of agricultural drought monitoring: A state of art review

Agricultural drought is a natural hazard that can be characterized by shortage of water supply. In the scope of this paper, we synthesized the importance of agricultural drought and methods commonly employed to monitor agricultural drought conditions. These include: (i) in-situ based methods, (ii) optical remote sensing methods, (iii) thermal remote sensing methods, (iv) microwave remote sensing methods, (v) combined remote sensing methods, and (vi) synergy between in-situ and remote sensing based methods. The in-situ indices can provide accurate results at the point of measurements; however, unable to provide spatial dynamics over large area. This can potentially be addressed by using remote sensing based methods because remote sensing platforms have the ability to view large area at a near continuous fashion. The remote sensing derived agricultural drought related indicators primarily depend on the characteristics of reflected/emitted energy from the earth surface, thus the results can be relatively less accurate in comparison to the in-situ derived outcomes. Despite a significant amount of research and development has been accomplished in particular to the area of remote sensing of agricultural drought, still there are several challenges. Those include: monitoring relatively small area, filling gaps in the data, developing consistent historical dataset, developing remote sensing-based agricultural drought forecasting system, integrating the recently launched and upcoming remote sensors, and developing standard validation schema, among others