Spatial risk assessment of opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan: integrating environmental and socio-economic drivers

<p>Recently the cultivation of opium poppy in Afghanistan reached unprecedented levels. It is agreed that the complex and coupled interactions of social, economic and environmental drivers are crucial for understanding the spatial and temporal dynamics of opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. In this context, we present an integrated risk concept, which considers environmental and socio-economic drivers of opium poppy cultivation. A set of spatially explicit indicators for the environmental suitability and socio-economic vulnerability was established and populated from a variety of databases. Subsequently, novel methods of modelling homogeneous and spatially explicit regions of opium poppy cultivation suitability, socio-economic vulnerability and risk are developed and applied. The risk assessment results demonstrate the complex nature of the illicit crops production in Afghanistan and prompt a more profound examination of the drivers of opium poppy cultivation in a spatial context. The study also confirms what has already been widely discussed in literature: that reasons for cultivation are spatially diverse and often distinct, meaning that any formulation of generalized explanations cannot be drawn without ignoring a more complex reality. Thus, an integrative spatial view of risk, which integrates the social dimension as well as environmental parameters, is required to better identify context-specific intervention measures.</p

Innovative Analysis Ready Data (ARD) product and process requirements, software system design, algorithms and implementation at the midstream as necessary-but-not-sufficient precondition of the downstream in a new notion of Space Economy 4.0 - Part 1: Problem background in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Aiming at the convergence between Earth observation (EO) Big Data and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), this two-part paper identifies an innovative, but realistic EO optical sensory image-derived semantics-enriched Analysis Ready Data (ARD) product-pair and process gold standard as linchpin for success of a new notion of Space Economy 4.0. To be implemented in operational mode at the space segment and/or midstream segment by both public and private EO big data providers, it is regarded as necessary-but-not-sufficient “horizontal” (enabling) precondition for: (I) Transforming existing EO big raster-based data cubes at the midstream segment, typically affected by the so-called data-rich information-poor syndrome, into a new generation of semantics-enabled EO big raster-based numerical data and vector-based categorical (symbolic, semi-symbolic or subsymbolic) information cube management systems, eligible for semantic content-based image retrieval and semantics-enabled information/knowledge discovery. (II) Boosting the downstream segment in the development of an ever-increasing ensemble of “vertical” (deep and narrow, user-specific and domain-dependent) value–adding information products and services, suitable for a potentially huge worldwide market of institutional and private end-users of space technology. For the sake of readability, this paper consists of two parts. In the present Part 1, first, background notions in the remote sensing metascience domain are critically revised for harmonization across the multi-disciplinary domain of cognitive science. In short, keyword “information” is disambiguated into the two complementary notions of quantitative/unequivocal information-as-thing and qualitative/equivocal/inherently ill-posed information-as-data-interpretation. Moreover, buzzword “artificial intelligence” is disambiguated into the two better-constrained notions of Artificial Narrow Intelligence as part-without-inheritance-of AGI. Second, based on a better-defined and better-understood vocabulary of multidisciplinary terms, existing EO optical sensory image-derived Level 2/ARD products and processes are investigated at the Marr five levels of understanding of an information processing system. To overcome their drawbacks, an innovative, but realistic EO optical sensory image-derived semantics-enriched ARD product-pair and process gold standard is proposed in the subsequent Part 2.</p