THE PICTURE PILE TOOL FOR RAPID IMAGE ASSESSMENT: A DEMONSTRATION USING HURRICANE MATTHEW

SPAM makes plausible estimates of crop distribution within disaggregated units. It moves the data from coarser units such as countries and provinces to finer units such as grid cells and creates a global gridscape at the confluence between earth and agricultural-production systems. It improves spatial understanding of crop production systems and allows policymakers to better target agricultural- and rural-development policies for increasing food security with minimal environmental impacts.

As part of the flood risk management strategy of the Brenta-Bacchiglione catchment (Italy), a citizen observatory for flood risk management is currently being implemented. A cost–benefit analysis of the citizen observatory was undertaken to demonstrate the value of this approach in monetary terms. Results show a reduction in avoided damage of 45 % compared to a scenario without implementation of the citizen observatory. The idea is to promote this methodology for future flood risk management.

Global cropland distribution is critical for agricultural monitoring and food security. We propose a new Self-adapting Statistics Allocation Model (SASAM) to develop the global map of cropland distribution. SASAM is based on the fusion of multiple existing cropland maps and multilevel statistics of cropland area, which is independent of training samples. The synergy map has higher accuracy than the input datasets and better consistency with the cropland statistics.

This paper provides an update to an international research activity whose objective is to facilitate access to satellite and other types of regional and global datasets for evaluating global models used to produce 21st century climate projections.

Citizen observatories involve citizens in making environmental observations that help to inform the decision making of local authorities. Although citizen observatories can generate many benefits, they also have an associated cost. In this paper, we undertook a cost-benefit analysis of a citizen observatory on flooding in northern Italy. The results show that the benefits outweigh the costs by 2 to 1. Implementation of other citizen observatories could help to reduce flood risk in the future.

The paper presents a global snapshot of the spatial and temporal distribution of VHR satellite imagery in Google Earth and Bing Maps. The results show an uneven availability globally, with biases in certain areas such as the USA, Europe and India. We also show that the availability of VHR imagery is currently not adequate for monitoring protected areas and deforestation, but is better suited for monitoring changes in cropland or urban areas.

This paper provides the formalism and examples of how observation operators can be used, in combination with data assimilation or retrieval techniques, to better ingest satellite products in a manner consistent with the dynamics of the Earth system expressed by models.