Dynamics of an Urban Forest in Response to Urban Development and Management Initiatives — Case of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve

Singapore, a tropical island of only 716 km², has substantial land under forest. But rapid urbanisation coupled with the scarcity of land has also resulted in extensive land clearance. Though highly urbanised, Singapore has managed to retain 4.5% of the land area under nature conservation, and 2.9% under closed forest. Out of four protected areas, two of these, the Central Water Catchment Forest (CWC forest) and Bukit Timah Nature Reserve (BTNR), are protected under the Parks and Trees Act of 2005 with a total area of 3,043 ha. Though originally connected, these two forests were separated from each other by a major highway, leaving BTNR, the smaller of the two, with a total land area of 163 hectares, surrounded by not just the highways, but also by a fast developing urban residential area. The forest boundaries have seen dense urban development as close as only 50 m from the forest edge. As a result, micro-climatic parameters such as atmospheric temperature, relative humidity, soil surface temperature, light conditions, wind velocity, all have seen significant changes over time and the gradient of such changes are drastic and steep along most forest verges. Currently some ameliorating steps are being taken by the forest management to counter the ill effects of too much encroachment and fragmentation

Evaluating the use of a mobile annotation system for geography education

ASTAR partia

Managing media rich geo-spatial annotations for a map-based mobile application using clustering

The world has still to emerge fully from the housing-triggered Global Financial Crisis, but housing crises are not new. The history of housing shows long-run social progress, littered with major disasters; nevertheless the progress is often forgotten, whilst the difficulties hit the headlines. Housing Economics provides a long-term economic perspective on macro and urban housing issues, from the Victorian era onwards. A historical perspective sheds light on modern problems and the constraints on what can be achieved; it concentrates on the key policy issues of housing supply, affordability, tenure, the distribution of migrant communities, mortgage markets and household mobility. Local case studies are interwoven with city-wide aggregate analysis. Three sets of issues are addressed: the underlying reasons for the initial establishment of residential neighbourhoods, the processes that generate growth, decline and patterns of integration/segregation, and the impact of historical development on current problems and the implications for policy

Tagnsearch: Searching and navigating geo-referenced collections of photographs

A*STAR gran

Integration of Wikipedia and a Geography Digital Library

In this paper, we address the problem of integrating Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, and G-Portal, a web-based digital library, in the geography domain. The integration facilitates the sharing of data and services between the two web applications that are of great value in learning. We first present an overall system architecture for supporting such an integration and address the metadata extraction problem associated with it. In metadata extraction, we focus on extracting and constructing metadata for geo-political regions namely cities and countries. Some empirical performance results will be presented. The paper will also describe the adaptations of G-Portal and Wikipedia to meet the integration requirements.Accepted versio

Understanding user perceptions on usefulness and usability of an integrated Wiki-G-Portal

This paper describes briefly the design rationale and philosophy of our implementation of a Wiki-G-Portal project, integrating Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, into G-Portal, a Web-based digital library, of geography resources. Initial findings from pilot study seemed to suggest positive perceptions on usefulness and usability of Wiki-G-Portal, as well as subjects’ attitude and intention to use Wiki-G-Portal. The paper concludes with recommendations for further work.Accepted versio

Sharing mobile multimedia annotations to support inquiry-based learning using Mobitop

A*STAR5820/2009</p

Exploring hierarchically organized georeferenced multimedia annotations in the MobiTOP system

A*STA