Representing, Modeling, and Visualizing the Natural Environment

The increase in public interest on the natural environment can most certainly be attributed to growing public awareness on the impacts of global warming and climate change. Representing, Modeling, and Visualizing the Natural Environment contains contributions from recognized experts and addresses crucial research questions pertaining to how the natural environment should be visually represented. The book considers the interplay between data representation, modeling, and visualization in environmental studies and reviews state-of-the-art GIS applications for the natural environment. The authors also identify emerging future research directions.

The explosion of public interest in the natural environment can, to a large extent, be attributed to greater public awareness of the impacts of global warming and climate change. This has led to increased research interest and funding directed at studies of issues affecting sensitive, natural environments. Not surprisingly, much of this work has required the innovative application of GIS and has led to a crucial research question: How should the environment be represented, modeled, analyzed, and visualized within a GIS? With contributions from recognized international experts, Representing, Modeling, and Visualizing the Natural Environment explores the interplay between data representation, modeling, and visualization in environmental studies. It reviews state-of-the-art GIS applications for the natural environment and presents them in the context of a range of recent studies. This focus identifies analytical challenges and illustrates broader opportunities for applying GIS within other areas of the sciences and social sciences. The integrated approach reflects the need for a single volume covering all aspects While many texts cover aspects of GIS application within an environmental context, few of these books focus specifically on the natural environment nor do they integrate the questions that encompass the full process of enquiry associated with GIS application in studies of the environment. The thirteenth volume in the widely recognized Innovations of GIS series, this book investigates each of these questions in turn, explicitly addressing all aspects of GIS application in the natural environment.

Introduction to Representing, Modeling, and Visualizing the Natural Environment, G. Harvey, N. Mount, P. Aplin, and G. Priestnall Representing the Natural Environment Keynote Paper: Representation of the Natural Environment, M. Duckham Keynote Paper: Representing Surfaces in the Natural Environment: Implications for Research and Geographical Education, N. Waters Developing Ontologies from a Domain Expert Perspective, F. Hemsley-Flint, G. Hart, J. Lee, and S. Thompson The Spatial Disaggregation of Great Britain and European Agricultural Land Use, C.J. McClean Comparing Different Land Cover Data Sets for Agricultural Monitoring in Africa, S. Fritz, L. See, F. Rembold, M. Massart, T. Ngre, and C. von Hagen Using GIS to Identify Wildland Areas in the North Pennines, S. Blair, L. See, S. Carver, and P. Samson Representations of Environmental Data in Web-Based GIS, P. Mooney and A.C. Winstanley Developing and Applying a Participative Web-Based GIS for Integration of Public Perceptions into Strategic Environmental Assessment, A. Gonzalez, A. Gilmer, R. Foley, J. Sweeney, and J. Fry Modeling the Natural Environment Keynote Paper: Challenges for Environmental Modeling, R. Aspinall Keynote Paper: Spatial Scale and Neighborhood Size in Spatial Data Processing for Modeling the Natural Environment, A-X. Zhu Invited Paper: Toward an Algebra for Terrain-Based Flow Analysis, D.G. Tarboton and M.E. Baker Spatial Terrain Modeling, S. Dalyot and Y. Doytsher Regions and Patterns of Forest Change in Brazil, A. de las Heras and I.R. Lake GM(1,1)-Kriging Prediction of Soil Dioxin Patterns, D. Guo, R. Guo, C. Thiart, and T. Oyana Visualizing the Natural Environment Keynote Paper: Information Access, Depicting Geography, and Geographical Visualization Tools, W.E. Cartwright Keynote Paper: Wiki Cartography and the Visualization of the Natural, D.Z. Sui Invited Paper: GIS-Based Landscape Visualization: The State of the Art, A. Lovett, K. Appleton, and A. Jones Visualizing Species Distributions, D.J. Lieske and D.J. Bender Visualizing Risk for Hill Walkers, A. Jardine and W. Mackaness Using Web-Based 3-D Visualization for Planning Hikes Virtually, S. Bleisch and J. Dykes PastureSim: A Visualization Tool for Pasture Management, C.E S. Rider and F.E. Reitsma Index

Nick Mount, Gemma Harvey, Paul Aplin, Gary Priestnall