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Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2022

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Abstract

Sustainable water resources management roots in monitoring data reliability and a full engagement of all institutions involved in the water sector. When competences and interests are overlapping, however, coordination may be difficult, thus hampering cooperative actions. This is the case of Santa Cruz Island (Galápagos, Ecuador). A comprehensive assessment on water quality data (physico-chemical parameters, major elements, trace elements and coliforms) collected since 1985 revealed the need of optimizing monitoring efforts to fill knowledge gaps and to better target decision-making processes. A Water Committee (Comité de la gestión del Agua) was established to foster the coordinated action among stakeholders and to pave the way for joint monitoring in the island that can optimize the efforts for water quality assessment and protection. Shared procedures for data collection, sample analysis, evaluation and data assessment by an open-access geodatabase were proposed and implemented for the first time as a prototype in order to improve accountability and outreach towards civil society and water users. The overall results reveal the high potential of a well-structured and effective joint monitoring approach within a complex, multi-stakeholder framework.

2021

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Abstract

There are neither volume nor velocity thresholds that define big data. Any data ranging from just beyond the capacity of a single personal computer to tera- and petabytes of data can be considered big data. Although it is common to use High Performance Computers (HPCs) and cloud facilities to compute big data, migrating to such facilities is not always practical due to various reasons, especially for medium/small analysis. Personal computers at public institutions and business companies are often idle during parts of the day and the entire night. Exploiting such computational resources can partly alleviate the need for HPC and cloud services for analysis of big data where HPC and cloud facilities are not immediate options. This is particularly relevant also during testing and pilot application before implementation on HPC or cloud computing. In this paper, we show a real case of using a local network of personal computers using open-source software packages configured for distributed processing to process remotely sensed big data. Sentinel-2 image time series are used for the testing of the distributed system. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and the monthly median band values are the variables computed to test and evaluate the practicality and efficiency of the distributed cluster. Computational efficiencies of the cluster in relation to different cluster setup, different data sources and different data distribution are tested and evaluated. The results demonstrate that the proposed cluster of local computers is efficient and practical to process remotely sensed data where single personal computers cannot perform the computation. Careful configurations of the computers, the distributed framework and the data are important aspects to be considered in optimizing the efficiency of such a system. If correctly implemented, the solution leads to an efficient use of the computer facilities and allows the processing of big, remote, sensing data without the need to migrate it to larger facilities such as HPC and cloud computing systems, except when going to production and large applications.

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Abstract

Rapid technological advances in airborne hyperspectral and lidar systems paved the way for using machine learning algorithms to map urban environments. Both hyperspectral and lidar systems can discriminate among many significant urban structures and materials properties, which are not recognizable by applying conventional RGB cameras. In most recent years, the fusion of hyperspectral and lidar sensors has overcome challenges related to the limits of active and passive remote sensing systems, providing promising results in urban land cover classification. This paper presents principles and key features for airborne hyperspectral imaging, lidar, and the fusion of those, as well as applications of these for urban land cover classification. In addition, machine learning and deep learning classification algorithms suitable for classifying individual urban classes such as buildings, vegetation, and roads have been reviewed, focusing on extracted features critical for classification of urban surfaces, transferability, dimensionality, and computational expense.

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Abstract

Rapporten utforsker og diskuterer potensialet for økt bruk av Stordata (engelsk: big data) teknologi og metode innenfor instituttets arbeidsområder. I dag benyttes Stordata-tilnærminger til å løse forvaltningsstøtteoppgaver, samt til forskningsformål, særlig i sentrene for presisjonslandbruk og presisjonsjordbruk. Potensialet for økt bruk av Stordata innenfor instituttet er stort. For å realisere potensialet er det behov for god samordning mellom organisasjonsenhetene og utvikling av strategisk kompetanse på fagområdet.

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Abstract

The size and location of agricultural fields that are in active use and the type of use during the growing season are among the vital information that is needed for the careful planning and forecasting of agricultural production at national and regional scales. In areas where such data are not readily available, an independent seasonal monitoring method is needed. Remote sensing is a widely used tool to map land use types, although there are some limitations that can partly be circumvented by using, among others, multiple observations, careful feature selection and appropriate analysis methods. Here, we used Sentinel-2 satellite image time series (SITS) over the land area of Norway to map three agricultural land use classes: cereal crops, fodder crops (grass) and unused areas. The Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and two variants of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), are implemented on SITS data of four different temporal resolutions. These enabled us to compare twelve model-dataset combinations to identify the model-dataset combination that results in the most accurate predictions. The CNN is implemented in the spectral and temporal dimensions instead of the conventional spatial dimension. Rather than using existing deep learning architectures, an autotuning procedure is implemented so that the model hyperparameters are empirically optimized during the training. The results obtained on held-out test data show that up to 94% overall accuracy and 90% Cohen’s Kappa can be obtained when the 2D CNN is applied on the SITS data with a temporal resolution of 7 days. This is closely followed by the 1D CNN on the same dataset. However, the latter performs better than the former in predicting data outside the training set. It is further observed that cereal is predicted with the highest accuracy, followed by grass. Predicting the unused areas has been found to be difficult as there is no distinct surface condition that is common for all unused areas.