This book will be useful both to those new to spatial uncertainty assessment and to experienced practitioners.

Spatial information is pervaded by uncertainty. Indeed, geographical data is often obtained by an imperfect interpretation of remote sensing images, while people attach ill-defined or ambiguous labels to places and their properties. As another example, medical images are often the result of measurements by imprecise sensors (e.g. MRI scans). Moreover, by processing spatial information in real-world applications, additional uncertainty is introduced, e.g. due to the use of interpolation/extrapolation techniques or to conflicts that are detected in an information fusion step. To the best of our knowledge, this book presents the first overview of spatial uncertainty which goes beyond the setting of geographical information systems. Uncertainty issues are especially addressed from a representation and reasoning point of view. In particular, the book consists of 14 chapters, which are clustered around three central topics. The first of these topics is about the uncertainty in meaning of linguistic descriptions of spatial scenes. Second, the issue of reasoning about spatial relations and dealing with inconsistency in information merging is studied. Finally, interpolation and prediction of spatial phenomena are investigated, both at the methodological level and from an application-oriented perspective. The concept of uncertainty by itself is understood in a broad sense, including both quantitative and more qualitative approaches, dealing with variability, epistemic uncertainty, as well as with vagueness of terms.

Highlighting new technologies, Remote Sensing of Natural Resources explores advanced remote sensing systems and algorithms for image processing, enhancement, feature extraction, data fusion, image classification, image-based modeling, image-based sampling design, map accuracy assessment and quality control. It also discusses their applications for

Integrating Scale in Remote Sensing and GIS serves as the most comprehensive documentation of the scientific and methodological advances that have taken place in integrating scale and remote sensing data. This work addresses the invariants of scale, the ability to change scale, measures of the impact of scale, scale as a parameter in process models, and the implementation of multiscale approaches as methods and techniques for integrating multiple kinds of remote sensing data collected at varying spatial, temporal, and radiometric scales. Researchers, instructors, and students alike will benefit from a guide that has been pragmatically divided into four thematic groups: scale issues and multiple scaling; physical scale as applied to natural resources; urban scale; and human health/social scale. Teeming with insights that elucidate the significance of scale as a foundation for geographic analysis, this book is a vital resource to those seriously involved in the field of GIScience.

This book describes recent developments in the modeling of hydro-climatological processes in time and space. The topic brings together a wide range of disciplines, such as climatology, hydrology, geomorphology and ecology, with examples of problems and related modeling approaches. Parsimonious hydro-climatological models hold the potential to simulate the combined effects of rainfall intensity and distribution patterns in the absence of precipitation records for short time intervals (e.g. daily to sub-hourly) and over large areas (e.g. regional to continental). In this book, we show how the principle of parsimony can be followed without sacrificing depth in seeking to understand a variety of landscape and surface processes that include hydrologic phenomena. Geographically speaking, the focus of the book is on Mediterranean environments. In this region, which is characterized by a complex morphology, soil erosion by water is a major cause of landscape degradation and the fragility of ecosystems is abundantly documented. By exploring interactions between erosive storms and land with the help of modeling solutions created at a variety of scales, the book investigates in detail the climatic implications for the Mediterranean landscape in an effort to bridge historical and contemporary research, which makes it unique in its approach. The book provides a valuable resource for environmental scientists, while also providing an important basis for graduate and postgraduate students interested in research on hydrological cycles and environmental changes.