Effective utilization of satellite positioning, remote sensing, and GIS in disaster monitoring and management requires research and development in numerous areas, including data collection, information extraction and analysis, data standardization, organizational and legal aspects of sharing of remote sensing information. This book provides a solid overview of what is being developed in the risk prevention and disaster management sector.

Disaster management is generally understood to consist of four phases: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. While these phases are all important and interrelated, response and recovery are often considered to be the most critical in terms of saving lives. Response is the acute phase occurring after the event, and includes all arrangemen

This second edition includes updated chapters from the first edition as well as five additional new chapters (Light detection and ranging (LiDAR), CORONA historical de-classified products, Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs), GNSS-reflectometry and GNSS applications to climate variability), shifting the main focus from monitoring and management to extreme hydro-climatic and food security challenges and exploiting big data. Since the publication of first edition, much has changed in terms of technology, and the demand for geospatial data has increased with the advent of the big data era. For instance, the use of laser scanning has advanced so much that it is unavoidable in most environmental monitoring tasks, whereas unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs)/drones are emerging as efficient tools that address food security issues as well as many other contemporary challenges. Furthermore, global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are now responding to challenges posed by climate change by unravelling the impacts of teleconnection (e.g., ENSO) as well as advancing the use of reflected signals (GNSS-reflectometry) to monitor, e.g., soil moisture variations. Indeed all these rely on the explosive use of “big data” in many fields of human endeavour. Moreover, with the ever-increasing global population, intense pressure is being exerted on the Earth’s resources, leading to significant changes in its land cover (e.g., deforestation), diminishing biodiversity and natural habitats, dwindling fresh water supplies, and changing weather and climatic patterns (e.g., global warming, changing sea level). Environmental monitoring techniques that provide information on these are under scrutiny from an increasingly environmentally conscious society that demands the efficient delivery of such information at a minimal cost. Environmental changes vary both spatially and temporally, thereby putting pressure on traditional methods of data acquisition, some of which are highly labour intensive, such as animal tracking for conservation purposes. With these challenges, conventional monitoring techniques, particularly those that record spatial changes call for more sophisticated approaches that deliver the necessary information at an affordable cost. One direction being pursued in the development of such techniques involves environmental geoinformatics, which can act as a stand-alone method or complement traditional methods.

As Web service technologies have matured in recent years, an increasing number of geospatial Web services designed to deal with spatial information over the network have emerged. Geospatial Web Services: Advances in Information Interoperability provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings and applications in the area. This book highlights the strategic role of geospatial Web services in a distributed heterogeneous environment and the life cycle of geospatial Web services for building interoperable geospatial applications.

"This book explores the latest empirical research and best real-world practices for preventing, weathering, and recovering from disasters such as earthquakes or tsunamis to nuclear disasters and cyber terrorism"--Provided by publisher.

Effective utilization of satellite positioning, remote sensing, and GIS in disaster monitoring and management requires research and development in numerous areas, including data collection, information extraction and analysis, data standardization, organizational and legal aspects of sharing of remote sensing information. This book provides a solid overview of what is being developed in the risk prevention and disaster management sector.

Each year, disasters such as storms, floods, fires, volcanoes, earthquakes, and epidemics cause thousands of casualties and tremendous damage to property around the world, displacing tens of thousands of people from their homes and destroying their livelihoods. The majority of these casualties and property loss could be prevented if better information were available regarding the onset and course of such disasters. Several remote sensing technologies, such as meteorological and Earth observation satellites, communication satellites, and satellite-based positioning, supported by geoinformation technologies, offer the potential to contribute to improved prediction and monitoring of potential hazards, risk mitigation, and disaster management which, in turn, would lead to sharp reductions in losses to life and property. This book explores most of the scientific issues related to spatially supported disaster management and its integration with geographical information system technologies in different disaster examples and scales. Dealing with disasters over space and time represents a long-lasting theme, now approached by means of innovative techniques and modelling approaches. Several priorities for actions are outlined toward preventing new and reduce existing disaster risks, including understanding disaster risk, strengthening disaster risk governance for management of disaster risk, investing in disaster reduction for resilience, and enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response. This book presents ideas to address the challenges facing different components of spatial patterns related to ecological processes, and the published articles extended versions of selected presentations from the Gi4DM Conference in 2019 in Prague.