The HUTUBS head-related transfer function (HRTF) database

The database contains head-related transfer functions, 3D head meshes, anthropometric features, and headphone transfer functions of 96 subjects

Global maps of soil temperature

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we provide global maps of soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at a 1-km2 resolution for 0–5 and 5–15 cm soil depth. These maps were created by calculating the difference (i.e. offset) between in situ soil temperature measurements, based on time series from over 1200 1-km2 pixels (summarized from 8519 unique temperature sensors) across all the world\u27s major terrestrial biomes, and coarse-grained air temperature estimates from ERA5-Land (an atmospheric reanalysis by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). We show that mean annual soil temperature differs markedly from the corresponding gridded air temperature, by up to 10°C (mean = 3.0 ± 2.1°C), with substantial variation across biomes and seasons. Over the year, soils in cold and/or dry biomes are substantially warmer (+3.6 ± 2.3°C) than gridded air temperature, whereas soils in warm and humid environments are on average slightly cooler (−0.7 ± 2.3°C). The observed substantial and biome-specific offsets emphasize that the projected impacts of climate and climate change on near-surface biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are inaccurately assessed when air rather than soil temperature is used, especially in cold environments. The global soil-related bioclimatic variables provided here are an important step forward for any application in ecology and related disciplines. Nevertheless, we highlight the need to fill remaining geographic gaps by collecting more in situ measurements of microclimate conditions to further enhance the spatiotemporal resolution of global soil temperature products for ecological applications

Global maps of soil temperature

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we provide global maps of soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at a 1-km² resolution for 0–5 and 5–15 cm soil depth. These maps were created by calculating the difference (i.e., offset) between in-situ soil temperature measurements, based on time series from over 1200 1-km² pixels (summarized from 8500 unique temperature sensors) across all the world’s major terrestrial biomes, and coarse-grained air temperature estimates from ERA5-Land (an atmospheric reanalysis by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). We show that mean annual soil temperature differs markedly from the corresponding gridded air temperature, by up to 10°C (mean = 3.0 ± 2.1°C), with substantial variation across biomes and seasons. Over the year, soils in cold and/or dry biomes are substantially warmer (+3.6 ± 2.3°C) than gridded air temperature, whereas soils in warm and humid environments are on average slightly cooler (-0.7 ± 2.3°C). The observed substantial and biome-specific offsets emphasize that the projected impacts of climate and climate change on near-surface biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are inaccurately assessed when air rather than soil temperature is used, especially in cold environments. The global soil-related bioclimatic variables provided here are an important step forward for any application in ecology and related disciplines. Nevertheless, we highlight the need to fill remaining geographic gaps by collecting more in-situ measurements of microclimate conditions to further enhance the spatiotemporal resolution of global soil temperature products for ecological applications

Global maps of soil temperature.

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we provide global maps of soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at a 1-km2 resolution for 0-5 and 5-15 cm soil depth. These maps were created by calculating the difference (i.e. offset) between in situ soil temperature measurements, based on time series from over 1200 1-km2 pixels (summarized from 8519 unique temperature sensors) across all the world's major terrestrial biomes, and coarse-grained air temperature estimates from ERA5-Land (an atmospheric reanalysis by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). We show that mean annual soil temperature differs markedly from the corresponding gridded air temperature, by up to 10°C (mean = 3.0 ± 2.1°C), with substantial variation across biomes and seasons. Over the year, soils in cold and/or dry biomes are substantially warmer (+3.6 ± 2.3°C) than gridded air temperature, whereas soils in warm and humid environments are on average slightly cooler (-0.7 ± 2.3°C). The observed substantial and biome-specific offsets emphasize that the projected impacts of climate and climate change on near-surface biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are inaccurately assessed when air rather than soil temperature is used, especially in cold environments. The global soil-related bioclimatic variables provided here are an important step forward for any application in ecology and related disciplines. Nevertheless, we highlight the need to fill remaining geographic gaps by collecting more in situ measurements of microclimate conditions to further enhance the spatiotemporal resolution of global soil temperature products for ecological applications

Rooftop segmentation and optimization of photovoltaic panel layouts in digital surface models

Rooftop photovoltaic panels (RPVs) are being increasingly used in urban areas as a promising means of achieving energy sustainability. Determining proper layouts of RPVs that make the best use of rooftop areas is of importance as they have a considerable impact on the RPVs performance in efficiently producing energy. In this study, a new spatial methodology for automatically determining the proper layouts of RPVs is proposed. It aims to both extract planar rooftop segments and identify feasible layouts with the highest number of RPVs in highly irradiated areas. It leverages digital surface models (DSMs) to consider roof shapes and occlusions in placing RPVs. The innovations of the work are twofold: (a) a new method for plane segmentation, and (b) a new method for optimally placing RPVs based on metaheuristic optimization, which best utilizes the limited rooftop areas. The proposed methodology is evaluated on two test sites that differ in urban morphology, building size, and spatial resolution. The results show that the plane segmentation method can accurately extract planar segments, achieving 88.7% and 99.5% precision in the test sites. In addition, the results indicate that complex rooftops are adequately handled for placing RPVs, and overestimation of solar energy potential is avoided if detailed analysis based on panel placement is employed

A fast instance selection method for support vector machines in building extraction

Training support vector machines (SVMs) for pixel-based feature extraction purposes from aerial images requires selecting representative pixels (instances) as a training dataset. In this research, locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) is adopted for developing a new instance selection method which is referred to as DR.LSH. The intuition of DR.LSH rests on rapidly finding similar and redundant training samples and excluding them from the original dataset. The simple idea of this method alongside its linear computational complexity make it expeditious in coping with massive training data (millions of pixels). DR.LSH is benchmarked against two recently proposed methods on a dataset for building extraction with 23,750,000 samples obtained from the fusion of aerial images and point clouds. The results reveal that DR.LSH outperforms them in terms of both preservation rate and maintaining the generalization ability (classification loss). The source code of DR.LSH can be found in https://github.com/mohaslani/DR.LSH

Solving Combined Geospatial Tasks Using 2D and 3D Bar Charts

This paper presents a user study that investigates2D and 3D visualizations of bar charts in geographic maps.The task to be solved by the participants in this studyrequired estimation of the ratio of two different spatial distancemeasures and relative ranking among potential candidates. Theresults of this experiment show that subjects were equally fastand accurate when using both the 2D and 3D visualizations.Visual discomfort was reported by almost half of the testpopulation, but performance was not affected. Our study alsoshowed that frequent game players did not benefit more froma 3D visualization than inexperienced game-players