This title contains chapters written by noted researchers and experts. It brings together the concepts, theories and experiences of experts in the field of geoinformatics in relation to natural resource management.

Stress on natural resources has recently increased due to commercialization and the need to provide livelihoods for locals. Because they are such core parts of everyday life, ensuring sustainability in resource management is of paramount importance. Only by integrating the tools of spatial information science can an effective course for preserving and protecting natural resources be created. Spatial Information Science for Natural Resource Management is a pivotal reference source that explores coordinated approaches to sustainable development and management of natural resources to keep a balance of the environment, ecology, and human livelihood. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics including crop yield estimation, ecosystem services, and land information systems, this book covers interdisciplinary techniques in monitoring and managing natural resources. This publication is ideally designed for urban planners, environmentalists, policymakers, ecologists, researchers, academicians, students, and professionals in the fields of remote sensing, civil engineering, social science, computer science, and information technology.

Sustainable management of natural resources is an urgent need, given the changing climatic conditions of Earth systems. The ability to monitor natural resources precisely and accurately is increasingly important. New and advanced remote sensing tools and techniques are continually being developed to monitor and manage natural resources in an effective way. Remote sensing technology uses electromagnetic sensors to record, measure and monitor even small variations in natural resources. The addition of new remote sensing datasets, processing techniques and software makes remote sensing an exact and cost-effective tool and technology for natural resource monitoring and management. Advances in Remote Sensing for Natural Resources Monitoring provides a detailed overview of the potential applications of advanced satellite data in natural resource monitoring. The book determines how environmental and - ecological knowledge and satellite-based information can be effectively combined to address a wide array of current natural resource management needs. Each chapter covers different aspects of remote sensing approach to monitor the natural resources effectively, to provide a platform for decision and policy. This important work: Provides comprehensive coverage of advances and applications of remote sensing in natural resources monitoring Includes new and emerging approaches for resource monitoring with case studies Covers different aspects of forest, water, soil- land resources, and agriculture Provides exemplary illustration of themes such as glaciers, surface runoff, ground water potential and soil moisture content with temporal analysis Covers blue carbon, seawater intrusion, playa wetlands, and wetland inundation with case studies Showcases disaster studies such as floods, tsunami, showing where remote sensing technologies have been used This edited book is the first volume of the book series Advances in Remote Sensing for Earth Observation.

This exciting new volume will provide a comprehensive overview of the applications of geoinformatics technology for engineers, scientists, and students to become more productive, more aware, and more responsive to global climate change issues and how to manage sustainable development of Earth's resources. Over the last few years, the stress on natural resources has increased enormously due to anthropogenic activities especially through urbanization and industrialization processes. Sustainable development while protecting the Earth's environment involves the best possible management of natural resources, subject to the availability of reliable, accurate and timely information on regional and global scales. There is an increasing demand for an interdisciplinary approach and sound knowledge on each specific resource, as well as on the ecological and socio-economic perspectives related to their use. Geoinformatics, including Remote Sensing (RS), Geographical Information System (GIS), and Global Positioning System (GPS), is a groundbreaking and advanced technology for acquiring information required for natural resource management and addressing the concerns related to sustainable development. It offers a powerful and proficient tool for mapping, monitoring, modeling, and management of natural resources. There is, however, a lack of studies in understanding the core science and research elements of geoinformatics, as well as larger issues of scaling to use geoinformatics in sustainable development and management practices of natural resources. There is also a fundamental gap between the theoretical concepts and the operational use of these advance techniques. Sustainable Development Practices Using Geoinformatics, written by well-known academicians, experts and researchers provides answers to these problems, offering the engineer, scientist, or student the most thorough, comprehensive, and practical coverage of this subject available today, a must-have for any library.

There is no doubt that today, perhaps more than ever before, humanity faces a myriad of complex and demanding challenges. These include natural resource depletion and environmental degradation, food and water insecurity, energy shortages, diminishing biodiversity, increasing losses from natural disasters, and climate change with its associated potentially devastating consequences, such as rising sea levels. These human-induced and natural impacts on the environment need to be well understood in order to develop informed policies, decisions, and remedial measures to mitigate current and future negative impacts. To achieve this, continuous monitoring and management of the environment to acquire data that can be soundly and rigorously analyzed to provide information about its current state and changing patterns, and thereby allow predictions of possible future impacts, are essential. Developing pragmatic and sustainable solutions to address these and many other similar challenges requires the use of geodata and the application of geoinformatics. This book presents the concepts and applications of geoinformatics, a multidisciplinary field that has at its core different technologies that support the acquisition, analysis and visualization of geodata for environmental monitoring and management. We depart from the 4D to the 5D data paradigm, which defines geodata accurately, consistently, rapidly and completely, in order to be useful without any restrictions in space, time or scale to represent a truly global dimension of the digital Earth. The book also features the state-of-the-art discussion of Web-GIS. The concepts and applications of geoinformatics presented in this book will be of benefit to decision-makers across a wide range of fields, including those at environmental agencies, in the emergency services, public health and epidemiology, crime mapping, environmental management agencies, tourist industry, market analysis and e-commerce, or mineral exploration, among many others. The title and subtitle of this textbook convey a distinct message. Monitoring -the passive part in the subtitle - refers to observation and data acquisition, whereas management - the active component - stands for operation and performance. The topic is our environment, which is intimately related to geoinformatics. The overall message is: all the mentioned elements do interact and must not be separated. Hans-Peter B ahr, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr.h.c., Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany.

The use of geographic information systems (GIS) is exploding worldwide in both number and scope. This book outlines the advent of GIS in natural resource management and explores how various data sets are applied to specific areas of study. Topics include spatial and non-spatial domains; multi-scale framework and resource data; environmental, demographic, and economic indicators; and modeling.